


The Desolate House

by Howling_Harpy



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: 1960s, Baking, Domestic, Estrangement, Explicit Sexual Content, First Kiss, Friends to Lovers, House Cleaning, M/M, Moving, Mutual Pining, Past Relationship(s), Porn with Feelings, Post-Divorce, Post-War, Regret, Reunions, Slow Burn, Slow Dancing, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:09:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27063928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Howling_Harpy/pseuds/Howling_Harpy
Summary: It's been fifteen years since Carwood has last seen or spoken to Speirs when they reunite suddenly at an Easy Company reunion and have both recently relocated back to the US.Carwood has promised to his mother to finish packing and cleaning the family's boarding house that's about to be put up for sale, and on a whim invites Speirs to help him. He didn't expect him to actually show up.
Relationships: Carwood Lipton/Ronald Speirs
Comments: 20
Kudos: 68
Collections: Loose Lips Sink Ships Prompt Meme





	The Desolate House

**Author's Note:**

> This baby is a product of multiple things. It's my reunion fic, a prompt fic, my autumn blues and all the yearning. My friend called it "hating happiness," and another "that good pining". Judge for yourself!
> 
> I'm actually very happy about this since it was so much work and took so much time, but I got to write something this long and it's about the OTP so I feel accomplished. 
> 
> I really hope you'll have a good time reading this! 
> 
> *
> 
>  **Disclaimer:** This is a work of fiction based on the HBO drama series and the actors' portrayals in it. This has nothing to do with any real person represented in the series and means no disrespect.

For once, the invitation to a reunion reached Carwood in time. He was so used to having it bounce in foreign mail for weeks and reach him after the event he couldn’t have attended in the first place. But this time it hadn’t gone past him, and this time he was able to show up to see his brothers after many years apart.

Most of the work that went into throwing a reunion was credited to Bill Guarnere, who was the first person who received Carwood at the hotel lobby and he got to thank him right away. 

“Lip! Fancy seeing you here! Welcome, welcome,” Bill greeted loudly as soon as he spotted Carwood dragging his suitcase and swung towards him remarkably fast on his crutches. 

Carwood smiled and reached out his free arm to welcome Bill into a hug. “Hi, Bill. It’s been some time, huh?”

Bill laughed, colliding into him and propping his chin on his shoulder. Standing still he could let one hand go of the crutch and smacked Carwood on the back. “It has, buddy, it has! Where have you even been? It’s been forever!”

Carwood sighed. It felt good to be hugged, and he wasn’t really a hugger. Only people he was in the habit of hugging were his mother and his children, but apparently also just about everyone he had served with. “Overseas, working,” he answered when Bill stepped back and they continued together towards the reception. “It’s been… Ten years, I think? Sounds longer than it feels like, doesn’t it?”

“Nah, it feels forever too,” Bill said but didn’t sound broken up about it. “It’s gonna be a great reunion this year, a great turnout! Your timing couldn’t be better, so many could make it this year, even from the west coast.” 

“That’s great, Bill. Thanks for doing this for all of us.”

Bill blew a raspberry and rejected Carwood’s thanks easily, and it was obvious from his bright grin that just getting to be there at their event was all the thanks he needed. Carwood wasn’t going to argue that since he felt the same way. He dropped his luggage off at the reception and continued with Bill to the large conference room at the ground floor, and the sheer noise echoing in the hallway told Carwood even before the sign “Easy Company Reunion 1960” that he was headed in the right direction.

For the reunion they had reserved one of the large conference rooms of the hotel that could be converted into a ball room if needed, and for the sake of their reunion it was a little bit of both. Several round tables with white tablecloths had been laid out with chairs for everyone and their families, in the back there was a buffet table, and even though the front stage was empty they had a jukebox and a little dance floor cleared. 

Most of the guys had already arrived, and as soon as Carwood stepped inside he felt younger somehow, lighter, and at home. Bill must have known how he felt or maybe it was just plain obvious on him, because by his side he chuckled with a knowing hum.

“Feels good to be back, right, Lip?” he said with a grin. “Come, join us. Say hi to the fellas!”

As if he could do anything else, so Carwood did follow Bill around. Old friends had formed groups at the tables, and almost always it was the guys together and the families mingling among themselves. Bill was acting as a host, swinging by between the tables and stopping for only a little while to chat and make sure everyone had everything.

The sight made something tender unfurl in Carwood’s chest. He was in no hurry to choose a seat but let his gaze circle the room and pick out familiar faces. He had traded letters with his closest buddies over the years abroad, but still the sight of all of them in one room was overwhelming. 

Everything had changed, yet nothing had. 

He spotted Shifty together with Popeye and McClung, laughing together at something just like they had used to, only now McClung had gotten classes and Shifty had a small boy bouncing on his knee. A roar of laughter came from one especially crowded table, and Carwood wasn’t at all surprised to see George Luz in the middle of it, Joe Toye, Buck Compton and Don Malarkey around him with women he recognized as their wives from pictures he had seen, plus a clan of dark-headed children that were climbing over Luz and Don who was apparently the favourite uncle. 

It was Buck who drew Carwood’s attention the most as officers were a rare show even though Bill swore he invited them all every year. Carwood didn’t really count himself among the officers since he was originally an enlisted man, but seeing Buck there left him hopeful. Buck had not been the most typical officer either, but still seeing him made Carwood wonder if the rest of his officer buddies would show too, maybe even Major Winters who was his most frequent correspondent. 

He didn’t have the time to wonder about it for long though, because he had been spotted as well.

“Carwood Lipton! How long do you plan to just stand there?!” yelled a bright, upbeat voice Carwood would have recognized in his sleep, and turned to see Smokey Gordon limping towards him.

“Hey, Walter,” Carwood greeted him with a smile and welcomed him in a hug, and even though he had less hair now and Walter had grey in his, the moment they embraced made it feel like no time had passed at all.

Carwood was invited to sit at his table, where also Heffron, the Guarneres, Grant, Carson, Garcia and Martin happened to sit. After a quick recap of how the past year had treated them all the conversation naturally turned to health and exercise, and before anyone knew it, they were all back at Toccoa and musing about the two years when they had first started to train and see what they were made of.

Those were some of everyone’s favourite memories, how young and strong and silly they all had been, and how they hadn’t known each other yet. It was half bragging and half complimenting each other, and they got food and drinks and told same stories together, finishing each other’s sentences here and arguing about who was most right there. 

Frannie Guarnere fit into their group just perfectly, as did Mrs. Martin who was always happy to put faces to guys her husband had written to her about and playfully needled them about something her Johnny had written her. Babe was as much Bill’s ginger soul brother as he had always been, maybe even more so, and Frannie seemed to be as married to him as to Bill. 

Walter sat rigidly and Carwood could sense the subtle pulse of pain from him, but his grin was just as wide as ever. His lovely wife subtly helped him to more food and drink so that he wouldn’t have to get up too often and giggled like a girl when Walter joked. Their kids were apparently two of the little monsters causing ruckus together with the Luz kids, and Carwood had to take a second look to look for kids several inches taller than he remembered them. 

It was a splendid time, and Carwood realized over and over again how much he had missed everyone. He felt younger, like he had really returned back to Toccoa and was sizing up a bunch a fellows from all over the country for the first time, but this time knowing that they would be the best friends he’d ever had. 

The jukebox had been hooked up to speakers and playing music a lot louder than it would have on its own. Carwood chuckled to himself when he watched a bunch of dignified middle-aged parents and professionals kick it on the dancefloor like they were twenty again. Bill was among them and he hadn’t even slowed down a bit, Frannie clicking her fine heels probably just as well as she had in high school. 

It was lovely, and Carwood was abundantly thankful that no one was asking why he had come alone. He was sure they all knew how things had ended with Joanne and him, it had already been a couple of years and word travelled, but still he didn’t feel like bringing it up now. He felt a bit guilty over how good he felt about his new suit that had been tailored for him, because he knew he used it to comfort himself about coming alone. 

Most couples went to the dancefloor at one point or another, but Carwood stayed where he was, nursing his beer and talking quietly with Walter and Grant. Then Grant got up and it was just Walter and him, Mrs. Gordon having taken off with Mrs. Martin to no doubt plan something terrible for their husbands.

Walter had a boyish gleam in his eyes, and Carwood had a feeling that would stay there until the end of his days.

“So, you’re back in the States then,” he said.

Carwood nodded. “Yeah. I don’t have a place yet, but I’m here to stay. After ten years abroad it’s a welcome change.”

“Oh wow. Where you’re planning to go now?”

Carwood shrugged. “I don’t know. South-Africa was interesting, Switzerland was wonderful, France was pretty good too, England very rainy but getting by with English was nice,” he listed. “I think I’m in the mood for milder weather and less busy life. I’ll probably want a house of my own.”

“Mr. World-traveller,” Walter chuckled, making Carwood smile and shrug. “I never would have taken you for the adventurous type, you know.”

“I don’t have many wild stories, so you were probably right,” Carwood said with a quirk of a brow and took a sip from his beer. “Lots of work, that’s what my life’s been. Great work, fulfilling work, yes. But I’m ready for something else.”

“Your resume probably gets you a job anywhere you like.”

“We’ll see,” Carwood said, shrugging awkwardly at the recognition even though his suit probably underlined it more than any bragging words. “You tell me, how’s home life going for you? I’ve only rented all my life, so I bet you could teach me a lot about keeping a house.”

Walter threw his head back and laughed. “Oh, I don’t know, Lip,” he said as soon as he calmed down a bit, “we’re winging it, me and Lottie. I don’t renovate, she don’t cook, so it’s a lot of trips to the library and wringing our brains over it every time a floorboard creaks or the roof leaks! Wouldn’t trade it for the world, though. Let me tell you, that woman is brave as a bear, extracting wasp nests and climbing the roof when it needs to be done.”

“Well she has to be a bit unusual to handle you,” Carwood noted and nudged his friend’s leg under the table.

Walter gave him a smile that was positively suggestive. “Oh, she does alright.” 

Carwood laughed into his glass and shook his head. He tipped the glass back to get the last mouthful of beer while Walter laughed at his own comment, and at that moment Grant came back for his place at the table.

“Hey, guys. Look who decided to… Show… Up,” Grant said, stammering just a bit. “One more… officer… to join the band.” 

“Hi. Long time, no see, fellows.”

Carwood felt his heart skip a beat and he was glad he had already swallowed his drink. When he took the glass off his lips and set it back on the table, the perspiration leaving yet another damp circle on the tablecloth, his eyes happened on Grant first and then the man he had apparently fetched from the lobby. 

Carwood felt a smile on his lips and a lump in his throat. “Hello, Ron,” he greeted, a wave of nostalgia crashing against him. 

Speirs’ eyes were still green and striking, not at all dimmed by lines around them. “Hi, Carwood,” he replied. 

Speirs joined their company surprisingly easily even though he wasn’t that close to most of them. Carwood knew from Winters’ letters that Speirs actually liked to come to reunions more than most officers, and even though Winters suspected Speirs didn’t sense the awkwardness the higher ranks supposedly brought to the gatherings, Carwood thought that Speirs had always secretly liked everyone better than it seemed. In Carwood’s opinion the time for feeling awkward about rank was behind them, Winters himself a much missed guest, and distantly Carwood thought he should write to him and tell that even Ron “Bloody” Speirs looked just fine and ordinary in a grey-blue three-button suit and was welcomed to sit with them. 

“Here’s… another one who’s been… Abroad,” Grant said as he sat back down next to Speirs. “Though not anymore, right?”

Speirs had a smile on his face that made him look distinctively different. The way Carwood remembered him was stark and strong twenty-five-year old in the Airborne’s bests about to board a ship back to the States. This man was forty and you wouldn’t have guessed him a soldier from the way he looked. “Germany, yes,” he said, and immediately Carwood knew that voice and had to marry that to the man in front of him, “no more though. No more army deployments of any sort for me.” 

Walter made a surprised sound and leaned forward. “Oh? You retired then?”

Speirs’ smile quirked and he shrugged like trying to say there was no helping it. “Yes. It was time to figure something else to do,” he said, and just like that the topic was finished.

Carwood spun the empty glass in his hand and concluded that Speirs still had that natural command of any situation to him. It was something natural to him and had never needed the gleaming bars on his collar or the Thompson on his shoulder. 

Grant was still talking, and Speirs waited patiently for him to finish his longer sentences before answering, and then he returned it with questions of his own. Like everyone, Speirs wanted to know where his buddy worked and if he was married and how many kids there were now again, but he too slipped back toward the memories. He had more stories that were new to them, tales from his days with Dog, but even those weaved into the stories of Easy like that day when they had competed against each other, or when Speirs had challenged Walley More to run Currahee with him. 

It was comfortable, and the sweet nostalgia about seeing his friend again stayed nestled in Carwood’s chest when he looked across the table. It warmed his heart to see Speirs again and compare this mature man to the one in his memories, who had really been little more than a reckless boy back then, but he also found that he didn’t have much to say to him. Speirs was an old friend that had drifted from him and become someone else in his absence, leaving behind only the tender ache of a memory.

The music kept playing and kept the mood joyful. The wives came to fetch their husbands to the dancefloor or to another table to say hi to someone else, and before they knew it, Carwood and Speirs were the only two men left at the table. 

Carwood glanced across the table and saw Speirs measuring him with his gaze. The easy smile from earlier was gone, dimmed into a quiet contemplation that was hard to return directly. Carwood couldn’t think of anything to say, so he turned his attention to the dancefloor and saw from the corner of his eye Speirs doing the same. 

“They look like kids when they dance, don’t they?” Speirs said. “It’s hard to believe most of them are parents themselves.”

Carwood chuckled and watched how Bill and Frannie spun so wildly they cleared themselves plenty of room, how Shifty and his wife were the perfect opposite with their languid lull of a waltz with steps of their own. Luz was amusing his youngest daughter who sat perched on his arm with a hand in his and her head held high and her black curls bouncing, and that was one of the sweetest things Carwood had seen all day. 

“Yeah, at the time I didn’t think anyone of them would really grow up,” Carwood commented, thinking back to the evenings of herding singing, yelling, drunken boys to their bunks. He almost didn’t want to look away, but finally dared to glance back at Speirs, who was trying not to stare at him. 

Carwood turned fully back to him and studied the man across from him. What was most familiar about Speirs was the way he sat, relaxed and confident at the same time, one arm draped over the back of the chair and the other thumbing at the silverware on the table. He didn’t stare back at him, but his eyes flicked here and there without really seeing anything and always returned directly to him. Carwood didn’t recall Speirs ever being so shifty with his gaze and wondered if he had become aware of his habit of staring with age and worked to chip it for the sake of others. 

Speirs flicked his gaze to Carwood’s face and to the table a few times and silence stretched between them. The music from the jukebox was from the days when they had been the closest of friends, and the reminder of days far gone underlined the awkwardness of their silence.

“I heard you’ve had good work,” Speirs said when he apparently couldn’t bear it anymore, and Carwood found himself surprised that he had broken first. “Glass manufacturing, if I remember correctly? I figured you went to college, right?” 

Carwood nodded. “Yes, I’ve been with the same company all this time. I’ve been really happy working there, and overseen factories in five countries during the past twelve years that I was with them.”

Speirs nodded, politely impressed. “And college?”

“I went,” Carwood said, “got a degree in engineering. It’s been exactly what I’ve been doing in glass manufacturing. I was the first in my family to graduate college, by the way.”

“Ah, congratulations,” Speirs said. “Your mother must have been very proud.”

“She was, yes.”

Silence fell again, the topic having dried up far too soon. Carwood felt distantly disappointed about it; in the past he could have talked for hours and hours to Speirs just about anything, and the quiet, solemn Captain Speirs could do the same with him. Carwood wondered if he remembered any of their conversations, if he still guarded those things Speirs had chatted to him about, but now that he thought about it, he recalled nothing specific. 

Only the general feeling came to mind, that feeling of comfort and warmth even in drafty houses with plenty of paperwork between them, or during long walks together from headquarters back to the line, or from foxhole to foxhole, when words had flowed freely and curiosity had seemed endless. He recalled the giddiness and the thirst for knowledge, but only faintly. For a moment Carwood marvelled with faint melancholy what time did to friendship like that. 

“You decided to retire from the army, then?” Carwood asked in turn. 

Speirs looked slightly taken aback by the conversation being turned to him, then took a quick sip from his glass. “I did, yes. It was time,” he said. 

“I think Winters mentioned you were promoted Lieutenant-Colonel,” Carwood continued. He bit back something bitter when he thought that apparently all they knew of each other came from Dick Winters’ letters. 

“I was, yes. That’s what I reached,” Speirs admitted, sounding neither pleased nor displeased about it. “My final mission was as an American liaison in Spandau prison. I was there for a little over a year, then returned here and was honorably discharged.” 

Carwood knew the prison by reputation and couldn’t imagine stepping in there, but couldn’t think of anything to say about it either. It was strange how no one seemed to want to talk about the war, the least of its fallout. All anyone seemed to care about were the housing market, the rising economy and selling readily planned holidays to families of exactly four, the mom, dad and two kids, one boy and one girl. Carwood had nothing against looking forward and concentrating on building a life when the possibility for that was so hard-earned, but he didn’t like the wilful ignorance of the price either. He didn’t want to dwell, but he wanted to at least acknowledge and talk about it.

How ironic it was that he had the closest of his brothers right here in front of him, fresh from duty and just finished guarding the worst of the enemy, and for all his will he could hardly keep a conversation up with him. 

“How’s your son?” Carwood asked before he thought it through and grimaced internally. He felt like he was overstepping a boundary, like he no longer had the right to intrigue about such private matters, and he half expected a cold glare and a firm “none of your business.”

To his relief Speirs smiled, and not with just little affection. “My pride and joy,” he sighed, and for a second his eyes grew distant with memories. “He’s doing great, actually. We’ve kept in touch, as promised, and during my time in Europe I was able to visit him pretty often too. He’s damn near grown, taller than I am already, and wants to enlist as soon as he finishes school.”

“That’s wonderful to hear,” Carwood said, mostly relieved that the topic wasn’t a banned one. It had been for so many others at the time, and what still circulated was mostly gossip. Distantly he felt the pride of an old privilege about being in on the truth. It made him smile, and carefully Speirs returned it, then avoided his eyes again by bowing his head. 

Speirs kept his gaze on the tabletop for a moment and awkwardly scratched the side of his nose, his teeth worrying his smile until he reined it under control again. There was a softness to him that Carwood didn’t remember.

“How about you? How are Joanne and the boys?” Speirs asked with a forced lightness to his voice. Carwood remembered how much Speirs had once confessed hating small talk, and with a tug of sadness realized they had never before engaged in it between the two of them. 

Carwood was about to take a sip from his glass and had already picked it up when he remembered it was empty. He set it back down and cleared his throat. “The boys are doing great. Matt actually got a baseball scholarship to college, and Carl might not be such a bookworm but he’s doing his best and wants to learn a trade.” He was genuinely proud of his sons, but he had a feeling he wanted to talk them up so that he’d believe that having a broken home wouldn’t affect either of them. He still remembered Joanne leaving and taking them with her back to the States, and it wasn’t a good memory. 

Speirs smiled when he talked about his children, and with a soft tug of pain Carwood remembered how much Speirs had always loved children. A memory of him with a baby in his arms was something that Carwood remembered with the same stark clarity usually reserved for near death experiences, and he had always secretly mused to himself that he had died a little at the sight of Ron rocking and cooing at a bundle of joy with a tuft of black hair on his head. 

“And Joanne?” Speirs asked, though his tone was just slightly reserved, and Carwood wondered if he had guessed or already knew and was just pretending for the sake of politeness. 

“We separated some years ago,” Carwood confessed, spinning the glass in his hand over and over again. It was a fine glass, but had a crudely thick bottom that made it heavy in his hand. “We lived in Switzerland at the time. It just didn’t work out anymore between us, so we decided that it would be best to call it quits. She took the boys and returned to the States four years ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Speirs said automatically.

“Thank you,” Carwood acknowledged politely. He should have dropped the subject there, it had been politely received and delicately handled, but there was something about the avoiding flicker of Speirs’ eyes and so many things they both knew and didn’t say that kept him from letting the topic go. “It was still the right thing to do, I think.”

Speirs frowned slightly and cocked his head in polite confusion. Carwood already regretted speaking up.

“Returning to her, I mean,” Carwood specified. “We had a good go for years. It was nice. I think I did right by her, even if it didn’t work out in the end.”

Speirs looked at him when he spoke, and then his gaze slid off and back to the table again, where he rearranged the silverware by his serviette over and over again. “You have a beautiful family,” he said. It sounded like a random comment to make, but Carwood imagined he still knew Speirs well enough to read it in relation to what he had said. It wasn’t a direct agreement, but an acknowledgement of the good that had come out of it. 

It sounded accepting, and somehow that bothered Carwood. “I think I could go for another drink,” he said and stood up too quickly. 

“I’ll join you,” Speirs said and followed.

The jukebox was playing another fun swing song, something even more nostalgic than the previous one even though Carwood couldn’t recall ever hearing it before. They were silent when they walked to the back of the room to the buffet table and the self-service bar, and Carwood found himself picking out two bottles of beer and pouring Speirs a glass first. He hadn’t planned to, but when he was already at it, it was too late to stop. Speirs surrendered his glass easily enough and didn’t comment while Carwood served him, but there was a new strain in the air between them while he poured the glass. He wondered if it was tension or a memory. 

When they came back to the table, instead of Speirs taking his seat across from Carwood, he pulled out Walter’s vacant chair and sat next to him. Carwood glanced to his side, watching Speirs leaning his elbow on the table and casually sipping his beer. It was strange to be suddenly that close, and now he could really see Speirs, his eyes sharp and his hair lush and neatly within army-regulations, but also the lines on his face and the hardened angles that had been just settling in when he had been younger. Carwood wondered how he saw him, his hair thinner and body softer than the young soldier’s had been, if Speirs looked at him and judged he could no longer race him up a mountain.

“What are you planning to do now that you’re back?” he asked.

Speirs looked thoughtful for a moment.

“I don’t know,” he answered after a beat of silence. Then he laughed, a row of teeth showing and his eyes gleaming with mirth while the lines around them drew deeper, and Carwood felt warm with that nostalgia he couldn’t tell from longing or pain but basked in regardless. 

Speirs glanced towards him, and Carwood found himself smiling back at him, head tilted expectantly like he wanted nothing more than to hear more. Speirs’ smile drew just a little wider when he studied him up close. “The truth is, I didn’t really plan to retire. Suddenly it just felt that it was time, and now I’m here. I don’t even have a place of my own, I moved into the spare room of my sister’s and I don’t think her hospitality is going to last forever.” 

“So you have nothing planned?” Carwood asked, a little astonished by the impulsivity. 

“Nothing,” Speirs confirmed lightly and shrugged. It was clear he was suspended in the air with no plan, but he looked forward to it as calmly as ever. Carwood found he still admired him for it, that casual steadfast bravery that looked dignified on a man. 

It was again those moment when Carwood didn’t really plan it, but some part of him decided to act. He heard himself speak and it came from somewhere, but he had no clue when he had made the decision: “Do you remember the boarding house my family kept?”

Speirs tilted his head in interest. “Of course.”

“Well, it’s not anymore,” Carwood said. “It’s a dead field of business, and so Mom decided to close up. We always kept the house in good condition though and it’s in a nice place, so she’s decided to sell it. There’s still some things there that need to be combed through and packed up, and of course it’s going to have to be cleaned from floor to ceiling, but we think it’s going to sell well.”

“That sounds nice. Real estate is booming, I hear,” Speirs commented. He was listening patiently with an attentive spark in his eyes, and Carwood had a feeling he knew there would be a point that included him soon enough. Speirs just was never in any rush, never ruining anything by hurrying or revealing his cards too early. He was surprisingly delicate that way. 

Carwood felt competitive in an odd way and bided his time in turn, taking a sip from his drink. “She thinks so, and since I’m fresh back home and without a job at the moment, she asked me to drop by there and take care of it. I agreed, she needs my help, and I don’t have anything to do anyway.” 

Speirs didn’t say anything, just kept leaning exactly the way he was and let his gaze to wander. The jukebox was playing something new for a change, a slow pretty tune by Barbara Lewis, and Speirs seemed to be half listening to the song while paying only the polite amount of attention to Carwood.

“So I’m headed there and that’s going to be my October, packing stuff and cleaning my childhood home back in Huntington. She said all the furniture left there is free for taking too,” Carwood said. 

“Sounds like a lot of work,” Speirs noted.

“Yeah,” Carwood said and took a deep breath. “Would you like to join me?”

Speirs stared far away for a second, but a crease appeared between his brows as the words registered, and slowly his gaze sharpened and slid back to focus on Carwood. He didn’t say anything, but his head tilted slightly.

Carwood shrugged, trying to look casual. “Since you have nothing to do or a place of your own, you could come there with me. Stay over, help me with cleaning, stuff like that. How’s that sound?” 

It was of course a crazy idea. He was little more than a stranger, why on earth would Speirs agree to come live with him into a vacant house and clean it when he could stay with his family and look for a job and an apartment? At the same time Carwood hated how awkward the thought of two of them together in the same house felt, as if they had never shared everything and lived together tighter than most families ever did. 

“Alright,” Speirs said.

Carwood blinked. “Alright?” he asked, completely taken by surprise. 

Speirs nodded firmly, then shrugged. For the first time he looked less polite and more like himself, a decisive, confident man who took what he wanted and didn’t think twice about it. He looked more familiar too, and Carwood wondered if it was the beer. “Alright,” Speirs said again, “Sounds good. Just give me the date and the address and I’ll be there. Sounds actually like the perfect way to spend my time, I don’t like sitting around doing nothing.”

“Yeah, okay,” Carwood agreed. He was distantly aware that his heart had started picking up the pace and fluttering in the light, excited way he thought he had left behind in his youth. “I’ll write everything down for you. Just pack what you need, I’ll make you a bed and cook for you as thanks. How’s that sound?”

Speirs smiled again. “Sounds perfect.” 

The rest of the reunion was a blast, and with all the other men and their families around whatever faint veil of memories had gathered around Speirs and Carwood was dissolved and didn’t reappear. Speirs got up from his seat and gave one more long look and a nod to Carwood as if to solidify their agreement before wandering off to see his buddies, and Carwood didn’t talk to him again that night.

All in all he had a nice time and was left warm and content with good memories and comradeship, and even though he had been back in the country for some time, only then he felt really welcomed. Carwood couldn’t quite believe he had actually had the conversation with Speirs or invited him over, and the invitation any more than Speirs’ ‘yes’ didn’t feel real, not in that moment and not during the next week. 

Rationally he knew it had been agreed on, but only when he made the several hundred miles of a drive to West Virginia a week later and pulled up on the driveway to the old boarding house did it really become real to him.

Speirs was already waiting for him. He was sitting on the steps of the porch in jeans and a bomber jacket with his hands in his pockets and a small bag at his feet, and when Carwood pulled up to the house he stood up. 

Carwood parked and got out of the car. He couldn’t help the smile that bloomed on his face when Speirs approached him. It felt like a nice surprise to see him there, and the autumn wind ruffling Speirs’ hair and throwing it over his forehead revealed that it had actually been a bit longer since his last haircut than army regulations would have permitted. 

“Hi,” Carwood greeted and just couldn’t keep his smile at bay. “Have you waited for long?”

Speirs returned his smile more lightly than he had at the reunion and combed his wild hair back from his face. “Not really, a couple of hours tops. I took the bus and a cab from the station. I wake early out of habit and I figured it didn’t matter where I’d pass the time, at my sister’s or here.”

“Thanks for being here,” Carwood said and touched Speirs’ arm lightly to invite him with him as they started up to the porch. “How was the trip?”

“It was fine,” Speirs said and followed a step behind Carwood. “Nothing special. I actually enjoy the good roads, it’s hell to try to keep a jeep under control when there’s more potholes than road.” 

“Yeah, I bet,” Carwood chuckled. He took out his keys and started to open the several locks put on the front door. 

The house was old but well-kept. It was a grand wooden thing, painted warm brown with white accents, three stories and big windows topped with a steep roof covered with dark tiles. The chimney had been made anew only six years ago, and Carwood itched to check out his brother’s handywork on that. The porch covered the entire front of the house but it was now empty and looked even bigger without the garden furniture sets, the swing and the flower pots, not even the welcome mat remaining. When Carwood glanced at his feet, he saw the black spots burned into the wood just below the window and couldn’t help but grin. 

He got the front door open and they stepped inside. Carwood flicked the light on and saw the bare bones of his childhood home.

The front hall was empty and the staircase leading upstairs was missing the red carpeting. All the rugs had been taken away as were the paintings, mirrors and flower vases. The hall looked big and bare without anything in it, and out of habit Carwood toed his shoes off before walking further in.

Speirs was like a ghost at his heel, following him quietly from room to room as Carwood made his way through the home he hadn’t seen in more than a decade. It was like Speirs sensed Carwood needed to do this and gave him his space to just look, and if he had any comments or questions he was saving them for later. It was nice, and very considerate of him. 

Both sitting rooms downstairs were empty and seeing them like that hit Carwood harder than he had thought it would. They had both been furnished and decorated by his parents and his mother had kept them almost completely untouched since the passing of his father, and now both of those beautiful, cosy rooms felt cold without their paintings, perfectly matched tables, armchairs and pillows, curtains and bookshelves. He wondered what his mother had done with all the things, which ones she had kept and which ones sold. 

The kitchen still had a dining table and three chairs as well as some dishes in the cupboards. About three quarters of everything had been boxed and taken away, but it was still clearly a functioning kitchen with the bare necessities intact, some pots and pans and plates and a spice rack and some goods in the pantry. He noticed that at some point his mother had gotten a new wallpaper that was geometrically themed with big green diamond shapes on a cream background, and all the drawers and cupboard doors had been changed from wood-panelled ones into more modern flat ones with dark brass handles. 

Carwood huffed with amusement at the giant fridge that took up more than enough space and thought how much easier it must have been to feed all the guests with space like that available.

Speirs followed him upstairs just as quietly, his hand sometimes idly brushing against a railing or wallpaper. Most bedrooms were now empty, but there was more stuff left upstairs than down. Almost every bed was gone, but some rooms still had a nightstand and a lamp, some even an armchair, and most had three or more cardboard boxes full of random things like cords, appliances, books and forgotten clothes, the kind of things that piled up in the back of drawers and didn’t have a proper place. 

The master bedroom his mother had lived in still had the bed and Carwood wasn’t a least bit surprised. It was her marriage bed and it must have been hard to part with. It still had its mattress, and she had left a pile of sheets and pillows and a duvet at the foot for him. The bed was pretty much the only thing left. There was a bedside lamp on the floor still plugged to the wall even with the nightstand gone, the closet had been taken out, and the three rugs had been rolled up and piled against the wall. Carwood peeked into the bathroom, checked that the water was still running, and then left the room. 

Last was the room at the end of the hallway. Carwood peeked in feeling an unexplainable dread, but broke into a smile as soon as he saw it. There was still a creaky twin bed by the window, a wobbly self-made chair with some forgotten old clothes piled on top of it, and six or seven big boxes full of Lord knew what. 

Carwood turned back to Speirs then. “This used to be my room.”

Speirs raised his brows at him, a smile playing on the corner of his mouth and he took another look around. “It looks nice. Is the bed still same?” 

“Uh-huh,” Carwood said, walked in and dropped down to try the mattress. The springs creaked when he bounced up and down a few times and wondered how big it had felt for him once. He looked up to Speirs and grinned. “Do you think anyone’s going to pay money for a bed like this anymore?”

Speirs studied his smile with his hands still in his jacket pockets. “Well, it is an antique, so someone might.” 

His voice was soft in a way that tickled a memory somewhere in the back of Carwood’s mind. He was taken over by a déjà vu, the joy of adventuring through a large house rummaging through things left behind combining with the noise of a creaky mattress and that private smile and taking Carwood back. He half expected Speirs to swing his Thompson from his hands over his shoulder, come over and reach out to take his hand.

He didn’t, and the moment passed leaving Carwood feel slightly dazed by its intensity, but then he was back in October in his empty childhood home and there were no weapons in either of their hands. When he got up from the bed, Carwood felt an itch in his empty palms like he was missing something, rubbed them together to lose it and jerked his head up.

“Come, let’s see what’s left on the third floor and then figure out where to begin.” 

The third floor was a lovely little space, the steep roof making some of it too low to really use, but other than that it was cosy. It was half storage space with boxes labelled as “books”, “photographs”, “toys” and such, but the rest of it was a crafting space. There had been a sewing machine and a mannequin once, a table for cutting fabric and a little reading corner with a small table with a doily and a vase of dried flowers in it. Now most was gone, but there were still boxes of family memorabilia, a soft rag rug on the floor, and sunlight pouring in from the round window at the end wall. 

“Plenty of boxes,” Speirs noted.

Carwood agreed. “Yeah. Looks like most of the packing is done for us, but I think we should still look through at least these ones so that we won’t throw anything important away.”

“That’s a good idea. The furniture is probably the biggest problem.”

“Yeah. Moving it is going to be a pain,” Carwood admitted, drafting a plan in his head. “You wouldn’t happen to want any of it? You could just take whatever you want for your new place.”

Speirs shrugged. “That’s generous of you, but I don’t have a place yet. I’ll keep that in mind though.”

Carwood smiled. He had spoken again without meaning to, but some part of him simply wanted to give things to his stranger of a friend and be helpful. Something about gifting things to Speirs he would continue to hold onto even when they’d part ways again made him feel reassured. 

“Come, let’s settle in first and plan more then.”

They went back down to get their bags. Carwood had brought a suitcase and Speirs a smaller overnight bag, and they took them upstairs. Speirs insisted on setting up in one of the guest rooms, the one that had a pull-out couch still there, while Carwood dropped his things in the master bedroom. They agreed to share the bathroom and divided the counter with the sink with Carwood putting his things on the right and Speirs on the left. 

The first night at the house with just the two of them was heavy. The old wooden house creaked and groaned in the cold and damp autumn night, and its empty rooms seemed to echo with longing. It took Carwood a long time to fall asleep in the too big bed. He lay in the middle of it, the mattress vast on both sides, and thought to himself in the darkness that he was a bit like the house, suddenly empty of the buzz of life and about to be completely transformed. It was probably going to be alright in the end, but right now he felt too big and empty on the inside, everything of value already packed up and all that was left were the dusty old things no one wanted or knew what to do with.

He pulled the sheets up to his chin and thought of Ron a few rooms down. Army had taught them to fall asleep just about anywhere, but Carwood had been a civilian far too long to be able to just drop. He wondered if Ron had simply made the bed, laid down and was already asleep. Just before he fell asleep he thought how typical it was that everything else had been packed up, moved and cleaned, but still it was Ron wandering in the empty rooms.

The morning was a relief. Carwood felt rested despite the hours it had taken for him to fall asleep, and when he went down to the kitchen, Speirs had already made coffee and was eating toast for breakfast.

“Morning,” Speirs said, a piece of toast on a plate with cheese and cucumber slices on it in front of him and a ceramic coffee mug in hand. He was wearing jeans and a blue flannel shirt with the collar of a white t-shirt peeking underneath, his hair was tussled and his stubble stark. 

“Good morning,” Carwood answered, staring at him a little too long. He was still blinking dreams from his eyes, and Speirs seemed unreal. “Thanks for making coffee,” he said and went to pour himself a mug.

“Sure,” Speirs said. “Thanks for bringing groceries with you. I’ll pay when we go out for them next time.”

Carwood shrugged and smiled. He made himself a quick sandwich as well with a swipe of butter, cheese and ham and decided that it would do. “Don’t stress about it. You’re here to help me after all.” 

He sat opposite of Speirs at the table and started to eat. The topic of what their day would be like came up naturally as Speirs was just as goal oriented as Carwood remembered and liked to do things precisely, a quality Carwood actually missed from his army days. 

He suggested that it would make sense to finish the rooms with the least amount of stuff in them and clean them. It wouldn’t take long to haul the couple of chairs and small tables from the bedrooms down to the hall, and after that there would be plenty of rooms that just needed to be cleaned and they would be done with. It was the boxes on the third floor that would take longer to go through, and they had to keep their bedrooms, one bathroom and the kitchen as living space anyway.

Speirs agreed, and after the breakfast they started to work. 

It was a surprising amount of work even for two men to drag furniture through narrow doorways and down the stairs. It wasn’t that they were too heavy for them, they really weren’t, but manoeuvring them was an exercise in logistics. The tables were easy enough to just tip over, but some of the chairs had to be turned and turned and tipped just right to get them thought the doorways, and doing so alone would have been a nightmare.

All the furniture was carried downstairs and piled in the entrance hall against the wall. When they ran out of space there, they stuck the rest into one of the sitting rooms that was closest to the front door. It hadn’t looked like a lot, but piled into one room with no particular order in mind it was still a considerable amount, and Carwood wondered how many truckloads of stuff had already been hauled out of the house if this was the bare bones of leftovers. 

Speirs wiped a hand over his brow after they had dragged a particularly challenging armchair down. “Did you seriously plan to do this all on your own?” he asked.

Carwood shook his arms and rubbed his biceps to ease some of the ache out of the muscles. He smiled sheepishly. “Uh, yeah, I actually did,” he admitted, embarrassed by how poor a plan it would have been. “I had no idea there was this much stuff left. I imagined it would be just some boxes, maybe some kitchen ware and cleaning and gardening.” 

Speirs’ smile was lopsided and his brows high, but he chuckled in a friendly manner. “Aren’t you glad you figured to recruit help now?”

For some reason pointing that out made Carwood’s heart jump. He had considered asking for help in passing, but decided to rely on the neighbours if the need would arise. Originally he had planned to turn this favour to his mother into a retreat of sorts for himself, where he could work for a few weeks in peace and vent all his thoughts and feelings without being bothered. 

And now he had a long-lost friend here with him, doing everything except allowing his mind to rest.

“I didn’t plan to, but I got to admit that you’re being helpful. One of these chairs might have killed me in those stairs,” Carwood said and pointedly walked to the kitchen to fetch cleaning supplies from the closet far back. 

Speirs followed close behind. “I say we split the second floor rooms between us and work from the edges towards the stairs,” he suggested. 

“Sounds good to me,” Carwood agreed. He took out rags, two buckets and mops, soap and a dustpan with its brush. Speirs threw a couple of rags into one bucket and gathered half of the supplies in the crook of his arm.

“Can I ask…” he started, voice soft and a thoughtful drawl. 

Carwood’s heart skipped again and wild thoughts dashed through his mind. “Sure,” he admitted without looking up from the bottom of the closet, pretending to look through old shirts that had been cut into rags. 

“Why did you invite me here? I mean, specifically me,” Speirs asked.

It was the kind of a question that Carwood had feared, the kind that he didn’t have an answer to. He didn’t know how to reply, so he picked out a few more rags without rush and straightened up. When he turned back to Speirs, he met his carefully inspective look.

He could only smile and open his arms in an uncertain gesture. “I guess I just… wanted you here,” he said. He couldn’t have given a better answer then as he didn’t understand his own reasons any better than that, and what kind of an answer ‘we were friends once’ would have been to a stranger anyway?

But as vague as the answer was, it seemed to be enough for Speirs, who dropped Carwood’s gaze and nodded. “It’s good to be here,” he said, then frowned as if he was unhappy with himself, and added, “it’s good to see you.”

Carwood felt his mouth drying and that too familiar sting of nostalgia got him again, needling him with memories he had neatly packed away in 1945. “You too,” he said with feeling that made Speirs glance up to him again. Thankfully he didn’t say anything, and with that they went back upstairs.

It was quick work to clean empty rooms. It was dusting that Carwood hated with all his being, and just wiping down windowsills and then going through the floors in neat, big strokes was actually that kind of therapeutic work he had been after. He opened a window in each room for a while, and fresh air together with the scent of soap left him feeling satisfied.

It took them only two hours to be done with the whole floor, aside from the rooms they still used. 

Speirs wiped his hands on his jeans and dropped the rags into the bucket full of now dirty soap water. He had brough the mop and the dust bin with the bucket to the top of the stairs, and there Carwood met him.

“There,” Speirs said. “That was fast.” 

“Yeah, because you’re so much help,” Carwood agreed. “Thanks.”

Speirs smiled. He was doing more of that than Carwood recalled. “No problem.”

They went downstairs and cleaned the empty sitting rooms and the living-room in the back before dinner. That left only the kitchen, the entrance hall and the one room with piles of boxes, a few shelves and the furniture from upstairs. 

All in all, it was a productive first day, and afterwards Speirs insisted on cooking dinner. He said he agreed on letting Carwood pay him in groceries but wouldn’t be treated like a guest when he was there to work and was an old friend anyway. Carwood couldn’t bring himself to argue with any of that, so he settled on peeling potatoes when Speirs took care of the rest. Minced meat was turned into a meatloaf with peas and finely chopped onions, and the potatoes Carwood peeled where boiled and mashed with butter and a dash of milk. 

It was surprisingly comfortable in the kitchen. Carwood wondered out loud when Speirs had learned to cook, and Speirs noted that he hadn’t ever had a wife and army didn’t feed him all day every day, so he had learned. He had a story about a cooking course in England of all places, and then relayed how he was keeping his sister who was just as sparky as he was hospitable to her brother by cooking dinner while she took her kids to the park.

From time to time it was like no time had passed at all, and it reminded Carwood of when they had first met and become friendly. It was funny, since sitting at a dinner table after a big meal couldn’t have been more different from sitting in a jeep in biting cold as it bounced and rumbled forward on a bombed to hell road, but still the young Captain who had leaned towards him from the front seat and offered him a cigarette was there, wearing the same smile. With a striking clarity Carwood remembered the flame of the lighter and how it had warmed his face when Speirs had leaned closer to give him light, and when he looked at him now he saw the reflection of the same flame in his green eyes. 

They shared the bathroom and washed up for the night together. The house was cool in October, so Carwood had brought pyjama pants with him and wore an old t-shirt with them, but when Speirs stepped into the bathroom, he had pyjama pants but no shirt on. Carwood couldn’t help but to take a look and gather that a man in his forties could indeed look even better than a man in his twenties.

He turned his eyes firmly away and returned to shaving.

Speirs obviously had similar plans, but what he fished out of his toiletries bag along with a shaving cream can wasn’t a supermarket grade razor, but a black leather case with a proper razor blade in it. Carwood was amused. Somehow things like that fit Speirs, never doing things the easy way or by halves, but still he felt slightly anxious when he watched the man take the blade to his neck and shave.

“Where on Earth did you pick that up?” Carwood mused. 

Speirs looked at him through the mirror. “North Carolina,” he answered simply. 

“Oh,” was all Carwood could think to answer, and let the subject drop. It was just one of those endless curious things about Speirs, and concentrating on being amused by this one made it easier to stand there and share a bathroom in a manner that could only be described as intimate.

The second night was just as windy and the house groaned just as much, but Carwood fell asleep faster. The bed didn’t feel any more right and the empty rooms didn’t press on him less, but the amount of labour done during the day together with a hearty dinner knocked him out cold.

After getting rid of most of the furniture what was left were the piles of boxes here and there. During breakfast Carwood was already thinking what should be done with them, and the task was made harder by not knowing what his mother wanted him to do with the stuff in the boxes. 

The guest rooms were simple enough as the boxes were full of random junk, but it was the third floor that kept Carwood and Speirs busy for a few days.

Carwood tried to sort the boxes by some logic, but there were at least a dozen, so it didn’t really cut back the work to be done. They simply had to begin.

“This one has sewing supplies,” Speirs said as he opened one of the boxes. He put the lid back on, pulled the next one closer and opened it. “And this one has fabric. Does your mother want these back?”

“I suppose?” Carwood said. He really wasn’t sure, he had been certain that his mother would have made her husband bring all her things down and taken them with her by now, but apparently not. It seemed like such a waste to throw away good supplies and fabric that he decided they were going to be kept. “Let’s mark the boxes with stuff that we’ll keep. Here, take a marker,” he said and pulled out tape and a marker from one of the boxes he had opened first and found office supplies.

Speirs caught both the tape and the marker and did as he was told. He had his pile and Carwood had his, and he even seemed a bit excited to be digging through all the stuff hidden away in the attic. 

It was an endearing sight, Carwood wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. He had always hated moving and deciding what was worth moving with, and dreamily wondered if all those moves from country to country would have been less excruciating if Speirs had been there with him. It was a wistful thought that didn’t make any sense, and only the bright October sunlight painting the attic in gold and making the swirling dust in the air gleam allowed him to indulge in it longer than he usually let himself to. It was unfair to Joanne, so normally Carwood hadn’t allowed himself to think about Speirs like that, but now he no longer had that obligation to her.

He glanced up and subtly studied Speirs there in the middle of autumn gold, rummaging through cardboard boxes like on a lookout for something shiny, and recognized that he didn’t have to daydream now that he had the real deal here.

“Ah, jackpot,” Speirs said. He had peeled open one particularly big box and was peering inside with a grin on his face.

“What is it?” Carwood asked, curious and a little worried about that grin.

Speirs quirked a brow at him, didn’t answer but instead dug inside the box, pulling out an old, thick photo album. “What am I going to see if I open this one, I wonder?” he teased. 

“How are those still in here?” Carwood exclaimed and dragged himself across the floor to the box. He peeked inside and saw several other albums, all different, some new and some older, and wondered how mother had left them here. Then he looked up and saw Speirs flipping through the one in his hands, a mischievous smile on his face and hugging it close like preparing for Carwood to try take it away from him.

“Oh, no, what did you find?” Carwood asked and moved by Speirs’ side to take a look.

“Treasures,” Speirs answered simply, slowly turning the pages. 

He was only teasing. The part of the album he was at mostly had just pictures of Carwood’s parents during special occasions, like at their wedding, their graduation, standing in front of their new house, and so on.

And then Speirs turned the page to show a vaguely unhappy baby swaddled up in a cradle, and neat handwriting beneath the picture read ‘dear little Clifford during nap time’. Carwood couldn’t help but laugh awkwardly, and Speirs turned to him with a sly grin of his own. “You were adorable,” he cooed and kept flipping the pages.

Carwood squirmed in his place as he saw pictures of him and his brother at various school ceremonies, at Christmas and the odd birthday party. “Come on, Speirs, just leave it,” he tried to persuade the other, but Speirs just shook his head.

“Oh no, I just decided that I want a raise, meaning that I get to flip through all these pictures. Oh, that’s just precious!” Speirs had just come to a page where Carwood at the age of perhaps eight, wearing shorts, a sailor-collared shirt and various layers of smutch in the middle of Fourth of July picnic, was looking incredibly pleased with himself. Speirs turned to Carwood with his eyes gleaming. “I noticed the black spots on the porch. Might those have something to do with you?”

Carwood chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. He hadn’t thought that Speirs had noticed that. “Uh, yeah. I built a small firebomb and lit it on our porch, on that very day, actually,” he confessed and felt a little sheepish about it like he was about to be scolded.

Speirs laughed aloud though, clearly pleased with the story, and Carwood found himself watching the crinkle of his eye and the lines around his smiling mouth, his thoughts still half reminiscing about days long gone.

Speirs kept turning the pages of the album and watched Carwood and his brother George growing up, until he came to the final pages where stood two young men in uniforms, one in the Navy’s and one in the Airborne’s. He stopped at that picture, and when Carwood stole another glance he saw that the earlier grin had dimmed down to a smile that had just a hint of sadness in it. Carwood forgot himself to stare at Speirs’ profile and wondered about that unhappy smile, wondering what he was thinking. 

Carwood remembered moments like this from the war, during slow days of waiting he had spent at Speirs’ side. Usually they’d make those hours short by talking, but sometimes they just sat and smoked cigarettes, perhaps read the newspaper together, but were mostly quiet. Sometimes Carwood noticed that Speirs got a distant look in his eyes and an expression he couldn’t read on his face, and in those moments he had simply watched his friend, and if the moment stretched on too long, he’d gently nudge him and ask, ‘what are you thinking?’ Speirs had never minded. 

Now the quiet and the old photograph made Carwood feel distance growing between them again. As much as Speirs was there with him then, he was only a guest passing through, really no different from the hundreds of others who had been boarded there. It was a bitter thought, and partially that was what pushed Carwood to ask: “Hey, Speirs? May I ask?”

Speirs seemed to come out of his thoughts, but his mischievous spark was gone. “Go ahead.” 

“Why’d you retire from the army?”

Speirs turned to him and his gaze steeled over, which Carwood in turn found curious. “I just feel like doing something else now. Why do you ask?”

Carwood tilted his head. He knew what Speirs closing up looked and sounded like, and it was obvious that he was feigning him off from a topic that wasn’t as simple as he was pretending it was. Curiosity burned in the back of Carwood’s mind and urged him on, and along it was the fresh memory of being allowed to know Speirs through and through before, and a part of him missed that. “It just seemed like your thing. There has to be a reason for you quitting, you wouldn’t do it just because you felt like it.”

Carwood knew it was the wrong thing to say as soon as he had finished the sentence. Speirs’ expression hardened and his eyes grew reserved as he fully clammed up, and having overstepped so much pained Carwood.

“Oh, I don’t know about that. There are a lot of reasons for things we do or don’t do,” Speirs said, his voice gone soft and quiet in a way that promised a storm. He closed the photo album with a smack. “Like I never knew why you didn’t write to me.”

It was a sudden turning of the tables that left Carwood feeling taken aback. He stared, and Speirs stared right back with a challenging look in his eyes. 

Carwood took a slow breath and let his shoulders relax again. Some part of him that had been hurt a long time ago wanted to throw the question right back and ask why Speirs hadn’t written himself, but would only serve to agitate the subject. Carwood didn’t know about Speirs, he had long since decided he had hurt enough.

“I thought that a clean break would be easier,” he said. “I mean, I was going home to Joanne and you were staying in the army. You didn’t say you wanted to hear from me anymore, and I suppose I thought…” He had to search his thoughts for a moment. It had been such a confusing time, to be ecstatic about life and looking forward to seeing his wife and having a family, but at the same time feeling gutted by grief over leaving a friend behind. “We couldn’t be friends in the same way anymore, so I suppose I didn’t want to try clinging on that.”

All bristling fight was draining out of Speirs at his reply, his eyes grew soft and sad again and he let his gaze drop to the floor. He looked close to divine like that, eyes downcast and holding a heavy leatherbound book, seated in the middle of swirling gold of sunlight and dust. 

Then his mouth bowed up. “Why’d you keep calling me Speirs?” he asked.

Carwood blinked, then chuckled awkwardly. “I don’t know myself, now that you mentioned it.” 

Speirs smiled a little easier when Carwood laughed. “Well, don’t. There’s no need for us to be so formal. You can call me Ron.”

“Will do,” Carwood agreed and felt as light as the dust floating in the air. 

Sorting through the boxes took two days. Some boxes could be thrown aside as they were, some had to be unpacked and sorted into piles of trash and things to keep. Carwood wondered who his mother had got to pack the things upstairs because he knew for sure she would miss the photo albums, but then concluded that she had probably relied on him to look through them from the beginning. She could have asked George, but it was funny how a married man with children three hundred miles away was actually further than a divorced man across an ocean. 

On the fourth day they ran out of groceries, and Carwood went out shopping. With his salary he didn’t have to be too careful with money, but he had a feeling Ron liked things organized so he was mindful of what he bought, sketching the rest of the week’s menu in his head as he strolled through the super market. It was funny to be shopping for two for a change, and he thought fondly back to the times when Ron had been looting for two, rummaging through pantries and cellars and coming back to Carwood with his pockets and arms full of random goods like potatoes, sugar, and a bag of flour and some eggs, chocolate bars, coffee cans and bottles of liquor. 

The memories of them scrapping up colourful snacks of just about everything regardless of if they fit together or not tasted sweet now, like a chocolate sandwich, raw cake batter and honey straight out of a jar, and thinking back to that made Carwood pick out some extra goods and a new pie tin.

That afternoon they wrapped up the day’s work early so that Carwood could bake. Ron expressed his doubts about his skills, and Carwood accepted the challenge, so he ended up kneading dough under Ron’s scrutiny and constant commentary. He fried apple slices on a pan with cinnamon and sugar and threatened Ron with poisoning his slice if he didn’t cease with his comments, to which Ron shot back that Carwood could just make the pie good to make him stay and not resort to making him bedridden. 

“That sounds like a plot of a horror film,” Carwood commented as he served coffee and the freshly made apple pie. 

“It probably is, or at least should be,” Ron noted as he helpfully mixed sugar and milk in Carwood’s coffee while Carwood scooped ice cream on his pie slice. “Maybe that’s what I should do now that I’m no longer a soldier, pitch horror film concepts.”

Carwood chuckled. “Your love of horror films is probably the best kept secret of our nation. One would imagine a dignified officer such as you would enjoy a serious war drama before a monster flick.”

Ron took a bite of his slice of pie and shook his head. “Nah, horror is where it’s at. Did you see Creature from the Black Lagoon? It came out years ago but it’s one of my all-time favorites. It had amazing underwater scenes.”

“I think I saw the poster but not the film,” Carwood admitted and tried his own pie. To him it tasted fine even if he concluded he should have cut the apples into smaller slices or at least baked them longer.

“Pity. It’s pretty romantic, actually,” Ron said. “That poor creature, the only one of his kind left and so lonely. I don’t think he really meant any harm.” 

Carwood had only seen the poster where the monster was carrying away the horrified female lead, but leave it to Ron to find a completely different way to look at it. He leaned his cheek on his palm and smiled. “Your pitches for films would certainly be something completely different.”

“Hm, maybe so,” Ron said with a chuckle, entertaining the quip for a moment longer. The silence was comfortable and films would have been an endless source of conversation, but instead Ron grew serious. “I’m sorry I was short with you on the other day,” he said suddenly.

It took Carwood a moment to understand what Ron was referring to, but then he recalled the little moment of tension in his fresh memory of browsing through charming photographs in the attic chamber bathed in gold. “It’s okay,” he said, but Ron shook his head.

“No, I really shouldn’t have been like that. It wasn’t rude of you to ask and it’s not something I hate to talk about, it’s just that… I might have been a bit shocked how you saw through me so easily.” He took a quick sip of coffee, almost as if to calm his nerves. “It’s been so long, you know. I didn’t think you could still do that.” 

Carwood felt flushed with warmth. A part of him wanted to rock from side to side and coo, maybe lean to Ron and swear on true friendship that had stood the test of time and seek confirmation that they felt the same, but kept himself at bay. Things like that didn’t belong at the afternoon coffee table and didn’t go with American apple pie. “Then why did you retire?” he asked instead.

Ron took a deep breath and leaned back in his chair. He pushed a piece of his pie around on his plate, and Carwood knew not to rush him. “I came to think about some things when I was stationed at that prison,” he started, and Carwood settled down to expect a long story.

“They keep Nazi war criminals there, you know? I got to talk with a few, and it was pretty strange to say the least,” Ron explained. “I don’t know what I expected, I don’t know if I expected anything at all, but I just grew tired in there. I fit the role of a soldier and really wanted to stay in the army, and I don’t think it was the wrong call…” 

Carwood felt a sting of pain at that. He didn’t know why it was so painful still, or why it had been like that in the first place when Ron had nonchalantly dropped the news that he was making army his career on him like it was no big deal. And it hadn’t been a big deal, Carwood had already known that they’d part ways as soon as they were discharged and he had the duty of a husband waiting for him anyway, but still he had grimaced in pain. The wound was still there too, aching like it had back then when Ron said he wanted to stay and travel across the country and behind oceans instead of… Of nothing in particular. 

“I have three wars under my belt, if you can believe it,” Ron continued, unaware of Carwood’s sudden flashback, “but I think it was going face to face with the first one that made me think. Or maybe I’ve grown old and now I’m not so sure if things I have done were the right thing after all. It was all so much clearer when I was younger, starker and simpler.”

“Many things feel different when you’re younger,” Carwood agreed. “Things that felt right back then might not have been so simple after all. Or perhaps they were the right choice, but we couldn’t prepare for the consequences, not really.” 

Ron leaned forward again, elbows on the table, and sighed. “Choices, huh,” he said. “And you? Are you happy with your choices?” 

Carwood met Ron’s gaze head-on and saw unrest there, uncertainty and sadness, and wondered just what exactly had made Ron abandon what should have been a perfect career for him, one he was already successful at. In that moment Lieutenant-Colonel Speirs looked both older than forty and more uncertain than the twenty-five-year-old Carwood had once known. 

“I love my children,” Carwood said. “I’m thankful for having them. I did love Joanne too, she is a good woman and being married to her was a good time. It’s just…”

He was quiet for a moment, trying to put into words a feeling he had carried through the years and never dared to look at too closely, like a gift from one’s first love that one won’t inspect again for fear of it being plainer than the memory, yet too dear to part with. He didn’t regret his marriage even though it had ended up in divorce, but he did regret that it had cost him his best friend, an empty space Joanne hadn’t been completely able to fill. 

“I just wish we could have stayed friends,” Carwood finished with a twitch of a guilty smile. 

When he looked back at Ron his breath caught in his throat. Ron was looking at him with a flame in his eyes, one he had carried through the years and still held, just as bright and hungry like that little lighter could lit up and burn the whole house down. Carwood felt his heart pounding like it was trapped inside his chest and desperately wanted out, and it terrified him to think what it wanted once free. He half hoped and half feared that the silence would last forever and that Ron would reach out and take his hand, but he didn’t know what to do with that and couldn’t stand doing things by halves anymore either. 

Ron didn’t do anything of the sort, but seemed content to sit there and stare at something in Carwood’s eyes, who didn’t know what they showed but let the other look as he so desperately seemed to want. 

Finally, Ron dropped his gaze and picked up his fork again. “You know, I have to give you credit. This is a damn good apple pie.” 

“Thank you,” Carwood said, relieved that the moment was over and his heart could settle back down behind the bones trapping it. 

The rest of the day went with planning for future. Carwood spent an hour on the telephone with a phonebook in his lap, going through the antique shops and second-hand markets of the town trying to find someone to pick up at least some of the leftover furniture. Ron didn’t see the point of just sitting by and listening in, but went out onto the yard and the small garden in the back to see what should be done there.

Carwood managed to arrange things with a couple of buyers, and with a sense of accomplishment he set the receiver down. It was starting to look that getting the house empty, clean and in order to be sold wouldn’t take much longer than a week. 

He didn’t know how to feel about that. The house didn’t feel like a space that was meant to be lived in at the moment, but rather like what he and Ron were doing was draining it of any trace of life and the final things to be let out would be themselves. 

Still, when Ron came back inside from the quickly darkening autumn evening shaking water droplets and a few leaves from his hair and announced that they’d have to wait for all the leaves to fall from the trees for there to be any sense in raking, Carwood was wholly for the idea. Let it be until November at least for that to happen, he could stay there and pretend to sort old books and records and bake more pies. 

Washing up for the night had become something a bit like routine. They hadn’t agreed on it and didn’t plan it, but simply fell naturally to the rhythm and found themselves next to each other evening after evening. 

That night Ron had courteously waited until Carwood was out of the shower and dressed again before stepping in, and when Carwood was towelling his hair dry, Ron spread his shaving kit on the edge of the sink. 

“Okay, I just have to ask…” Carwood started, and Ron gave him a glance that told that he already knew about what but let him ask anyway. Carwood hesitated a moment longer as he watched Ron tapping shaving cream on his cheeks, the razor blade lying on a towel on the edge of the sink. “Why are you using a blade to shave?”

Ron chuckled, rinsed his hands quickly and picked up his blade. “I grew tired of buying razors and throwing them away. It’s a waste of money, especially since they don’t actually do the job that well. No, if you want a clean shave without irritating your skin, you use a blade.” He stretched out his neck, pressed the blade against his skin and carefully swept it up, then rinsed off the cream and stubble. He glanced to Carwood. “See?”

“Yeah, I guess…” Carwood admitted and watched a little longer as Ron kept shaving. His movements were practiced and sure, telling that he had been doing it for years and was obviously doing a good job. “I suppose what I was asking wasn’t actually why, but how. How’d you pick up that particular skill?” 

Ron glanced to him again, the blade swiping swiftly across his cheek, leaving a smooth trail in the white cream. He had that closed off look in his eyes again, but it was contemplative and Carwood simply looked back, hoping he still had that something that had made Ron want to open up to him in the first place.

Ron turned his gaze down to the sink again, rinsed his blade and shaved his upper lip. He was nearly done. Then, “After I returned from Korea, I started going to this barbershop near where I was living in North Carolina at the time. I always had the same guy doing my haircut or giving me a shave, and since I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep going there for long, I asked him to teach me.” 

Carwood’s heart gave a painful lurch. It was irrational as he very well knew, as at that point he hadn’t had talked with Ron for nearly ten years and Ron hadn’t really explicitly said anything more than having been a regular at a barbershop for a while. But still uncaring about his reason there was that one throb of pain that took him by surprise like he had begun to expect when Ron spoke of his life without him. All he could do was to keep it off his face, but he wondered if it was clear in his voice when he asked, “So you were a regular?” 

Ron didn’t meet his eyes but kept his expression neutral. “We were,” he replied casually. 

“Oh. Hm.” Carwood had no idea what to say. He had wanted to know even though he had simultaneously known he wouldn’t like it, but then again, what claim did he have on anything? He had been married at the time too, teaching his youngest son to throw baseball and taking his family on Sunday trips to parks, diners, movie theatres and amusement parks. 

Ron turned to him suddenly, a new spark in his eyes. His face was clean and it did indeed look better than a regular shave, and the blade was still in his hand. “Would you like me to do you?”

It was a mad offer. “Sure,” Carwood agreed without having to think about it.

Ron smiled, spinning the blade in his nimble fingers. “Sit down then, I’ll give you the best shave you’ve ever had.” 

Carwood did as he was told, sitting on the toilet lid and tilted his head back. Ron shook the shaving cream can, sprayed a copious amount of it onto his palm, and after a heartbeat of hesitation spread it on his palms before touching to Carwood’s cheeks. Carwood kept his face tilted up but cast his eyes down so he didn’t have to look into Ron’s keen eyes, and wondered if Ron took it as permission to spread the cream all over his cheeks and chin with such gentle care that was obviously more than needed.

When Ron picked up the blade again and took a hold of Carwood’s chin, Carwood had to smile. He must have been the only person in the whole world who had Ronald Speirs press a blade to his throat and adore it. 

“Stay still now,” Ron warned gently, fingers cradling Carwood’s chin and the blade warm from his own skin and hot water. It was a very sharp blade and Ron’s hands were steady, and it was like the blade didn’t touch him at all when it flew across his neck, the slight scraping sound it made the only proof that it was indeed shaving anything.

“Perfect,” Ron muttered, perhaps a praise at Carwood or his own handiwork, but it didn’t matter. It warmed Carwood to his core all the same. 

The blade kept sweeping in a dangerous caress over his neck, then his cheeks, each area needing only one sure stroke to be clean. When it came to his upper lip and chin, Ron pressed even closer and leaned down to concentrate, and Carwood had to spread his knees to accommodate him. His body was strong and radiated heat, and the smoky scent of his tar soap made Carwood want to lean even closer, but the blade on his face kept him still, only yearning. 

With great care Ron scraped the stubble off his lip, then his chin, his hand a constant steadying point under Carwood’s chin and jaw. Finally Ron set the blade aside and picked up the slightly damp towel that had sat on the counter and tapped Carwood’s cheeks and neck clean of any traces of shaving cream. 

At last, Carwood dared to glance up again and met Ron’s sparkling eyes, crinkled at the corners. Ron tapped the towel to his cheeks in a tender caress and smiled. “There. Smooth and beautiful. Take a look and feel it,” he suggested.

Carwood didn’t have the words to tell him to stay close just like that and so he let the moment slip away. Instead he stood up to look in the mirror and touched his hands to his cheeks while Ron hovered there next to him, watching him in the mirror. 

It was a perfect shave, smooth and soft to touch, and his skin felt fresh too without a trace of an itch. He smiled at Ron in the mirror. “It feels nice. Thank you.”

“Anytime,” Ron said, hanged the towel to dry and turned to leave. Carwood flicked the light off and followed.

It was minorly nerve-wrecking to leave the bathroom at night as you had to pass through the master bedroom. Carwood would stay and sleep in the double bed, but Ron would leave for his room two doors down the hallway. It was painfully intimate to be in the bedroom together after dark with their night clothes on, but somehow it was even more painful to watch Ron leave.

Tonight in the doorway Ron turned and lingered for a few seconds longer than before, and with his hand on the doorframe looked back at Carwood by the bed. He looked like he wanted to say something, but whatever it had been was switched for a simple, “good night.” 

“Good night,” Carwood replied and watched Ron close the door.

He stood still and listened to the sound of footsteps retreating down the hall, and only when he heard a door open and close he could stop wishing Ron would come back. He shook his head at himself and climbed into bed, rolled in the middle of it and wrapped the covers around himself.

It was once again a night when sleep eluded him. There were too many thoughts and feelings running through his head and making his heart pound, and there was no way to solve them just like that. 

A deep worry throbbed somewhere under his ribs when he thought back to the afternoon. Ron’s retirement had indeed something more to it, and it bothered Carwood to see Ron so rattled. Ron had always given the impression that he didn’t believe in things like trauma or combat fatigue, but Carwood could see that he wasn’t unaffected at all. He knew he carried the things he had seen and done with him every day, and even though few wanted to admit it, so did everyone else, and no amount of stories or names like Sparky or Bloody could raise Ron above them. 

But then again, Ron had turned the question about right and wrong and choices back at him, and there was once again something that irritated Carwood. _Are you happy?_ Ron had asked it like Carwood could have chosen anything else or as if it had been up to him to keep their friendship when Ron had been the one to pick his path first. 

That was something that made Carwood disgruntled as he ran circles in his thoughts, spinning around Ron like he so often did when he had riddled _what ifs_ with himself over the years. He tossed over in his bed, yanked the covers tighter around himself and huffed in frustration. No matter the time and distance, Ron always managed to spark sharp emotions in him, and he didn’t even have to be present to do so. 

Carwood hadn’t ever had a friend like that. Anyone else in the company simply hadn’t been like Ron. It had been peculiar, how he had known some of the men he served with for over two years, fought side by side with them, endangered his life and seen them endanger theirs, and knew without a doubt that they would die for each other, but still none of them had clicked with him like Ron.

Ron, who had appeared in a flurry of smoke and bloody snow and taken command, and Carwood had just kept carrying out his duty and all had been right since then.

No one was like Ron, and Carwood could tell that no one was like him to Ron either. They had these long, branching conversations about everything, and within a month Carwood knew more about Ron than anyone in the regiment, including even the Dog company guys Ron had known for two years. They walked outside when they could, wandering from outpost to outpost performing their duties in tandem, but the best thing had been the walk itself when it was just the two of them, and they could pretend they had all the time in world.

It had been friendship that had shimmered deep in Carwood’s chest and melted the frost of the evil winter, energized him like the sun and made his step in his heavy boots lighter again. Ron’s friendship had made it feel that maybe they’d live through the war and that maybe Carwood had the will and strength to bear it until the end.

Such precious friendship it had been. And then Ron had taken his hand for the first time. 

In Haguenau after their round was complete and the darkness had fallen already, the conversation had come to a natural pause and a comfortable silence had fallen, their shoulders pressed together and smile still warming Carwood. Then Ron took him by the hand, squeezed his fingers with his own and suddenly pulled him off the road and into an empty building, and the silence that had fallen on them solidified into something Carwood hadn’t dared to even try to break.

In the silence and darkness Ron had taken him up to the second floor and into a room, spun him around and pressed against his back, then pushed him up against a heavy dresser. Carwood had known what was happening from the moment when Ron pressed against him and it made a shocking burst of heat light up in his belly and spread down, but he had respected the silence and turned his moan into nothing more than heavy panting.

Ron had pawed at his clothing, his clammy hands were suddenly up Carwood’s shirt and then pulling his belt open, and Carwood trembled and squirmed when his trousers were pushed down just enough. His heart had hammered in his chest almost too hard for him to hear the click of Ron’s belt, but he knew to expect it and when his ears caught it, he was seized by both terror and desire he didn’t know what to do with, so he simply pushed back against his friend, grabbed the dresser and decided to be taken by the storm.

That had been the first time Ron took Carwood’s hand, but not the last. Every now and then, silence would fall and then Ron would take his hand and lead him to a secluded place, and in silence and darkness they would partake in something that Carwood had no words to describe and couldn’t begin to explain to himself.

Ron would push him into a corner, against a desk or bend him over on a couch, and Carwood would close his eyes and pant and shiver, and Ron would have his way with him. His hands would wander, pet and stroke and paw, then squeeze him into an embrace, and then he’d pull their trousers down. It had been only the second time when Ron had been prepared with a tin of some sort of a slippery jelly, and he had taken Carwood with the same care and strength he did most things. 

Carwood couldn’t say how he felt about these detours. Sometimes, when he was bent over in an outright undignified pose over an armrest of a couch with his clothes ruffled and his face pressed into the cushion with his friend thrusting inside him, he hated it. He hated Ron for being so quiet and the position for squeezing the breath out of him, but then Ron would lean back just a little bit and put his arms around him to hug him, nuzzle his forehead against his nape and give his shoulder the gentlest little nibble, and Carwood was flooded so full of love he didn’t know what to do with it.

Sometimes, he was so full of love he was thankful for the impersonality of the act and the silence, because he couldn’t begin to describe it, couldn’t acknowledge it or look directly at it for the fear of it overwhelming all and everything. 

Those were encounters Carwood tried carefully not to think about. He liked the memory of Ron as his best friend too much, liked musing about it and telling the odd tale without confusion or guilt, and that just couldn’t be if he allowed himself to dwell in the full picture.

After all, how could you puzzle together something like that? A best friend, who sometimes drags you into dark, secret places for a quick fuck?

It wasn’t decent, and Carwood was careful not to let his thoughts wander back to those places. If they ever pushed into his fevered mind when it was just him and his hand, he excused them as momentary madness and promptly put them out of his mind. 

When the people from the second-hand shops showed up and carried the rest of the furniture away in their trucks, the house was left even emptier than before. It was like the living space was slowly shrinking as they cleaned one room, a bathroom, a closet or a hallway after another and then locked it away. 

Lipton took a look at the rugs and carpets rolled up in the downstairs sitting room and the master bedroom. The rag rugs were old and dirty, and even though they had been made by his mother he concluded they had seen enough days already and had them tossed away. The remaining five carpets of various sizes on the other hand were in good condition and he decided to take them with him, maybe even use the gorgeous brown, red and cream one himself. 

After that all that remained in the house were the two bedrooms upstairs, the kitchen and the sitting room, as Carwood concluded to Ron after they had helped the delivery men carry away those backbreaking armchairs, the twin bed and three different old book shelves. 

“So it seems,” Ron agreed and pushed his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “That leaves only the garden then. What should we do about that?”

“Oh, that’s not much work,” Carwood started, thinking about the few flower beds covered with spruce branches for winter and the overgrown hedge. The grass might have needed mowing, but so close to winter that was pointless. “I’d say raking the leaves will suffice, but there’s no point before they have all fallen.” Their backyard garden had three big maple trees, all of them having only half shaken their flaming red leaves with more falling every day.

“We’ll just wait the trees out then,” Ron said with an amused chuckle. “I’m not in a hurry.”

“Yeah, me neither,” Carwood agreed and hoped the late autumn storms and first snow would delay themselves long into November. 

By the end of that Friday they had cleaned just about everything that could be cleaned, even scrubbed the bath they still used and went through the kitchen cabinets. When the night fell, the house echoed even emptier than before and Carwood couldn’t help lingering in the entrance hall by the bottom of the stairs, listening to it. 

Old wooden houses creaked and groaned, and as a boy he had teased his younger brother with ghost stories, telling him that the creaking floorboards were caused by the ghost of the previous owner, a rich old lady who had been murdered by her cruel in-laws for her fortune, and now she haunted all who dared to claim her house. The stories had spooked George enough for him to beg to sleep in their mother’s bed, which in turn had revealed the fact that despite being ten and the man of the house, Carwood himself crawled there to sleep on most nights. 

The house had felt too big even back then, but somehow closing the door on the void had eased it. That bedroom had become the heart of the house where their small family healed and where the warmth had begun to seep back into the rest of the house.

Carwood had almost forgotten how that emptiness felt, but now when he stood there, alone in the dark, he remembered it just like the boy of ten had experienced it thirty years ago. It wasn’t so much grief as it was change, the state of nothingness between forms. He knew what had been before and that it wouldn’t last forever, but still he felt lonely and impatient in that nothingness.

“Hey, I have a surprise for you,” Ron called out from the kitchen. 

Carwood’s heart skipped when he remembered that he wasn’t alone after all and turned towards the warm light spilling out of the kitchen. Ron appeared in the doorway with a pair of oven mittens  
and a mischievous grin.

“Oh no, what are you planning?” Carwood asked when he saw him, cautiously approaching the kitchen.

“Come and see,” Ron dared and turned on his heels. Carwood heard glasses being filled from the kitchen, and then he just had to see.

Ron had appropriated an old silver tray that now had a set of dessert plates and the last crystal glasses that had yet to be packed, now with a dash of cognac in each, and in the middle of it was a serving plate with a steaming, golden and crisp pastry roll on it.

“Never say I didn’t pick up useful skills while in Europe,” Ron said while putting the cork back on the cognac bottle. “I learned to drive on the left side of the road, speak two languages, and bake local goods.”

Carwood pressed his knuckles to his lips to cover his grin. “Is that a strudel?” he asked.

“Indeed it is,” Ron said and smirked. “Don’t worry, in hopes of not evoking bad memories, I made it with a cherry filling. I thought we could treat ourselves a bit while looking through those dusty boxes.” He set the bottle aside and picked up the tray, and Carwood stepped aside from the doorway to let Ron lead the way to the sitting room.

“You just had to one up me, didn’t you?” he said.

Ron gave him a sly glance. “Well there’s nowhere to sprint here, so I had to come up with something else.”

The comment made Carwood flush with an unexpected thrill that he couldn’t decide if he liked or not. It was a rush for sure, but the chill was a bit too close and he couldn’t remember what had been so funny about whistling bullets. 

Ron set the tray down on the floor on the good red carpet Carwood had admired earlier, then went to the cold fireplace and build a fire that chased the chill away. The sitting room felt too big without any furniture and only piles of cardboard boxes and one good oriental rug, but somehow the fire with its dancing light and warmth that struck away the cold made it feel cosy again. 

Ron sat cross-legged by the tray and Carwood joined him. They were surrounded by piles of cardboard boxes like children in a fortress they had built, and the bright gleam in Ron’s eyes was something Carwood knew from way back as he got to dig through things once again. He wondered if Ron was like that on Christmas morning and his bashful heart trembled at the tenderness of the image.

“So many books,” Ron commented as he browsed. “Should we pick through these or pass them along straight away?”

“Mom actually wants her novels back,” Carwood remembered. “They should be in a separate box.” 

“There are at least four boxes labelled as ‘novels’. How about the dictionary series?” Ron asked, picking out several thick, blue books that were different only due to the number of a volume on their backs. 

Carwood considered. “Let’s get rid of those. I don’t want to carry them, and they must be at least thirty years old at this point. If she wants a dictionary series, I’ll buy her a new one for Christmas.” 

“Already planning so far ahead, huh? Lovely,” Ron noted and put the books back into their boxes. 

Carwood blushed. He hadn’t really, his thoughts had simply happened on Christmas because of Ron and were still there. Luckily it was hard to tell in just the light of the crackling fire, and Carwood completed his diversion by turning to the strudel on the tray.

“May I take a slice of that?” he asked.

Ron was elbow deep in the next box already and turned to give Carwood a surprised look, his dark brows near his hairline. A curl of his hair he didn’t bother to comb into submission with grooming gel had fallen over his forehead all soft and fluffy. “I made it for you, of course you may,” he said like it was obvious.

Carwood smiled and reached for the knife and fork by the plate and cut into the pastry. The crust was leafy and impossibly thin, and inside there was a deep red filling of cherries just as promised. He was thankful for that little change as he feared apples would have still tasted like sickness, but the pastry itself was a welcome sight of something that reminded him of care between them. He had never dared to acknowledge beyond a simple thank you how much trouble Ron had gone through to magic up a strudel in the barely there wreckage of Haguenau, and it had gone on to become one of those unspoken things between them. 

When Carwood tried it, it tasted even better than he remembered. He could taste butter in the crust, and the thick, rich taste of cherries was softened with sugar just enough, leaving him with a strong taste of fresh fruit. 

He was just about to offer his complements when Ron exclaimed with triumph: “A-ha! You’ll never guess what I’ve found!” 

Carwood should have, they were at his old home after all, but his gut stirred with curiosity anyway. “What?” 

Ron pulled out something that looked like a worn-out pastel pink case that turned out to be an old record-player, its cord neatly wrapped into a figure eight and tied with a rubber band. He looked extremely pleased with himself and his find. “There’s bound to be some records here somewhere too.” 

That bashful side of Carwood that seemed to be thriving in the light of a fire and the safety of darkness nearby mused that this felt like a date, and from the bottom of his heart he hoped that there would indeed be records to play. Tonight he was in luck, because the very next box that Ron opened had nothing but records, a wide selection spanning two decades. He knew it was a mixed pile of his, George’s and their mother’s records, but also that it wouldn’t have anything very recent as all the new stuff was on cassettes. 

Ron was browsing through the newest treasure chest, and he had flipped past almost half of the entire box before his fingers stilled. “Oh my,” he said and pulled out a record from 1943. 

“That’s from before we knew each other,” Carwood noted. It felt strange to say that, as if there had never really been a time when they hadn’t known each other.

“It’s Vera Lynn,” Ron replied and turned the case around to see the list of tracks. “We might not have known each other yet, but they sure played her all through the war.”

Without any further comment Ron got up and went to plug the record player to the wall. When he opened the cord it reached easily from the plug to where they were seated in front of the fireplace. He pulled the record out of its cardboard case and set in on the player, then carefully placed the needle on the surface of it. Ron flipped the player on, the record started to gently spin, and the needle scratched ever so slightly before settling on the track. He adjusted the volume, and a charming harmony of violins, a contrabass and the odd saxophone in the background filled the room, a bit scratchy but so strikingly familiar that Carwood forgot everything else for a moment.

It was a wistful ballad, and while Carwood listened to it he took a careful sip from his glass and tried very hard not to look at Ron, who in turn made no pretence of staring at him. 

Carwood quirked a smile. “It’s nice to hear something like this from time to time,” he commented conversationally despite Ron’s heated gaze on him.

Ron returned his smile, but it didn’t dilute the intent clear in his eyes nor make Carwood miss the restless way his fingers tapped and stroked the edge of his glass. “Yes. The new stuff is okay, but I don’t know how to dance to it,” he said. “I like dancing.”

There was a beat of silence, only Vera’s yearning voice confessing to someone far away. Carwood felt the need to say something so that they wouldn’t be left alone with her pure voice that was singing about things he tried so hard not to think about. He wished Ron had been a bit more careful when picking a record to play.

_“You’ll never know…”_

He felt like he had to say something. “I was thinking about dancing at the reunion. It was a pity to miss out on it,” Carwood mentioned. “It felt like just about every one of the guys had a wife to dance with, and it’s not like our gatherings are USO dances where you can just ask someone.”

“I thought the same,” Ron said. “But I can’t claim that I hated to be alone with you at the table either.”

Carwood agreed wholeheartedly but couldn’t say it out loud. He just smiled down into his now empty glass and set it back on the tray with the half of a strudel, its dark red syrupy cherry contents spilling onto the plate. For a second Carwood dreamily speculated if Ron had poisoned him with it to hold onto him like he had joked earlier. He recalled one late night conversation where he had mentioned that cherries were considered an aphrodisiac by many.

“Would you like to dance now?” Ron suggested.

Carwood looked up in a snap and blinked.

Ron looked innocent and shrugged. “We missed out on it at the reunion. I’d like to make it up to you.” 

Carwood certainly felt drugged and decided to blame whatever would happen next on it when he replied: “Yes.”

Ron’s smile was brilliant when he jumped to his feet, and he was next to Carwood before he had even uncrossed his legs and offered a hand. Carwood took it easily enough, his heart jumping now that Ron’s hand was finally in his again and pulling him up from the floor. 

He was expecting it, but still ending up against Ron’s chest was a shock that left him reeling. Ron seemed to be able to see it, because his smile grew wider, those wonderful crinkles around his eyes becoming more defined and his green eyes full of sparkles like the fire warming them. Carwood couldn’t have stopped smiling even if he wanted to, being lulled by the music that took him back to dangerous times and beautiful moments during them, yet kept him rooted here in the arms of the same man. 

And then they both tried to step forward at the same time, stumbling slightly and not moving a bit. 

Ron tilted his head and raised his brows, not at all disturbed but rather curious. “Did you want to lead?” he asked like it was the most intriguing topic he could imagine.

“I… It’s all the same, that was just out of habit,” Carwood answered, more concerned about his feet and the fact that his fingers were cold while Ron’s hold was so warm. Vera Lynn’s warm voice sang over the wistful tune, sad yet still hopeful in the face of it.

_“You went away,  
and my heart,  
went with you…”_

They tried again, and this time Carwood thought of his steps, taking one back instead of forward, and concentrated on feeling Ron’s body and where he wanted to take him. His hand had naturally gone to Ron’s shoulder after Ron had taken his waist, and letting Ron use his steadier hold to lead made swinging to the music easier.

Ron was studying his face closely with a contemplative look and a curious smile that told tales of way too many ideas. “Do you mind it when I lead?”

“No, it’s fine,” Carwood said, shaking his head.

“Hmm,” Ron said and was satisfied with the answer for a second, but only to ponder it over and come back with a new question. “But do you like it when I lead?” 

_“You’ll never know, if you don’t know now…  
You’ll never know,  
if you don’t know  
Now…”_

Carwood met his eyes steadily and felt his cheeks growing warm like he had leaned too close to the fire. Ron’s shoulder was strong under his palm, a part of him he couldn’t recall ever having touched like this. It felt absurd, he felt like he should have touched Ron in every way. It certainly felt like he had, once. “I like it. I can lead, but with you I think I like it more when you do it,” he said quietly, not afraid of being heard but wanting to keep it just between the two of them as if the shadows in the corners could be listening. 

Ron smiled a bit wider, and a little slyer too. His head tilted slowly to the side like he was really taking in what he saw in front of him, contemplating and then inviting him to play. It had always promised trouble, that sharp look of playfulness. “Good. I only want to please, so I’d hate to impose or assume.”

“Yeah,” Carwood agreed breathlessly. His mouth felt dry and swallowing was a struggle, but he had a feeling that a glass of water wasn’t going to help this particular thirst, and he wouldn’t have given up their slow dance for the world anyway. 

Looking at Ron was getting more difficult. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, but whenever he did he saw altogether too many things in his eyes, too many feelings that wanted to be known and Ron would have let them be, and Carwood couldn’t quite take their burn all at once. He felt their warmth glowing on his cheeks, like a flame from a lighter so long ago, and he did take occasional peeks without trying to keep his shiver of a smile hidden. 

“Actually,” he continued, his voice low enough to blend in with the music, but Ron perked up like he had waited for him to speak. “I like dancing like this. I like that I get to look at you.”

Ron grew very serious all of a sudden and his hold a little tighter. Carwood sensed something stirring beneath the surface and leaned his body closer to be of comfort, and it was that strong instinct that made him care that also encouraged him to look Ron straight in the eye again.

Ron let his hand go from Carwood’s lower back. They were still swinging to the music, pressed together but their feet taking slow steps aside and back and forth in harmony, and Ron brought his hand up and pressed it gently against Carwood’s cheek.

“I’ve missed you,” Ron confessed in a whisper. 

The record scratched as the track ended, and silence fell into the room. The fire crackled and made the shadows around them keep dancing even when the record player no longer had any music to play, and Carwood felt his heart growing so tender it felt like a bruise, wounded and too sore to touch.

Ron’s hand was warm where it rested against Carwood’s cheek and shook in desperate tenderness when it caressed him. “I’ve missed you for years, and now here you are,” he whispered like in awe. 

Carwood let go of Ron’s shoulder and covered his hand with his own, pressing it against his cheek.

Ron sighed like in pain. First his eyes fell on Carwood’s lips, and his mouth followed. 

It was a kiss – that was all that Carwood could think. A real kiss, the first one they had ever had, and it was everything he could have ever wanted and nothing he had dared to dream. He couldn’t believe he had gone all his life without ever tasting Ron, without feeling his soft lips against his or his hot breath in his mouth in that second before they were sealed together.  
How had they never done this? It seemed impossible, and now that it was finally happening Carwood didn’t want to stop. Briefly Ron pulled back, their lips parting with a soft sound, but Carwood followed him and caught him into another, this one wetter and hotter. He wanted to make up for everything, for those rough moments in the dark, for the quiet moments between them, that spot of honey that had stuck in the corner of Ron’s mouth once and he hadn’t kissed away, for fifteen years without each other.

Carwood felt his heart hammering against his bones again, but now he knew he was giving it everything it desired already. He was drinking down every sweet thing he had ever wanted from Ron, everything he had longed for over the years, everything from that first bashful flutter of love that he had been dizzy with. He didn’t even know when he had wrapped his arms around Ron or started to lean on him, only came back to himself like that when they gently parted.

He opened his eyes to see Ron do the same, almost too close to focus properly but close enough to admire his dark lashes shielding his beautiful eyes that looked at him like something precious. 

Carwood shivered, his bruise of a heart trembling before the tenderness, at last soothed. “Stay with me,” Carwood whispered, still tasting cherries from Ron’s mouth on his tongue.

Ron leaned in to press a chaste little kiss on his mouth and lingered there. “I’ll stay. We won’t be running out of work anytime soon,” Ron promised. 

It was a sweet thought, and in that moment Carwood could believe in the bright autumn and how it would go on forever, and he didn’t mind that Ron had let go of his hand. In their little room with a joyful fire and dancing shadows everything was possible.

That night it rained hard. Fat drops kept hammering the roof and the wind howled outside, rattling the branches of the trees and tearing through the fields and forests and the garden. 

When Carwood woke up the next morning and came down for breakfast, Ron was again up already and coffee ready in the pot. He wasn’t seated at the table like usual but standing by the window, a blue sweater on and warming his hands on a coffee mug, looking out.

“The storm tore all the leaves down last night,” he said instead of a usual greeting. 

“Oh,” Carwood replied. He had guessed as much but hadn’t looked out yet, knowing fully well he’d see dark trees and the street absolutely plastered with wet leaves. 

“It looks like we can finish the garden today,” Ron said, then took his mug and a piece of untoasted bread with him and went back upstairs. 

It was a chilly day. The sun stayed behind a mass of grey clouds and the damp air made your nose runny in moments. The wind had howled more than enough during the night, but still it had some go in it and it rose up in sudden gusts. 

Carwood wore a t-shirt under his sweater and wrapped his dark blue coat tightly around himself before he went out. There were still two rakes and a wheelbarrow next to the wall on the backyard and a compost pile in the far corner of the yard, so the job was simple enough. Like with the second floor, Ron and Carwood agreed to start at the opposite ends of the yard and work towards a middle.

The maples in the backyard were all grey and naked, slowly swaying in the breeze with their bare branches rattling like old bones against each other, and the wet grass was like on fire with red and orange leaves drowning out the green. The trees were old, and now with the last of their summer brilliance shed looked like it too, their trunks barren and knobby, the heaviest of their low branches drooping towards the ground. 

“You’re quiet today,” Carwood noted as they raked. The work was easy to concentrate on, the repetition keeping him calm even though he had a bad feeling about the topic he was approaching.

“Am I?” Ron asked, obviously stalling. 

“Yes. You’ve been quiet all morning, and you’re quiet now,” Carwood pointed out. “What’s the matter?”

Ron was quiet again and sighed. Carwood listened to the sound of the raking, how it was slow but harsh. “Nothing’s the matter,” Ron claimed.

Carwood rolled his eyes. “Then tell me, why are you a completely different person today than you have been all week?”

“It’s just… It’s just that there won’t be a November for us,” Ron said, sounding like something Carwood had never heard him sound like. Defeated.

Carwood stopped raking and turned around. “What are you talking about?” he demanded.

Ron stopped too, just standing next to a growing pile of red and yellow and grass behind him. “Oh come on, Carwood. You asked me to help you with the clean-up, and we’re nearly done. After this, there’s no more chores left, and then we can lock up and leave. It’s making me a little bit gloomy, you might say.” 

There was something that Carwood could have lived without. He huffed and pressed his mouth into a line as he sensed one of Ron’s moods gathering its storm clouds above them. “So it seems. What of it?” he asked starkly.

To his surprise, instead of sparking up a proper argument, Ron just threw him a tired look. The whole man seemed tired nowadays, something Carwood hadn’t thought possible before, but perhaps it was the result of being between phases as well. 

“So, this is coming to an end and we’ll go our separate ways again,” Ron said. “Don’t get me wrong, Carwood, it’s been a wonderful week, so you will excuse me for feeling a bit down about it coming to an end.”

The words left Carwood absolutely lost for a moment. He tilted his head and frowned in confusion and growing worry. He didn’t understand what parting ways Ron was thinking up as he couldn’t imagine anything of sorts, not with the lingering taste of the last night’s kiss still on his lips. It had felt him hopeful, but the night storm seemed to have torn something apart. 

“Ron… Why would we part ways again?” he carefully asked. “We don’t have to do that again, not like the last time.” 

Ron gave him a smile that was just as sad as his whole demeanour that was currently the most unfitting part of him. He shrugged. “Maybe,” he said but only begrudgingly, “but really, what could there be? I don’t even have a job.”

“No, that’s not it,” Carwood said, narrowing his eyes. Ron could try to run and hide from him all he wanted, but he had the skill to see him. There was still something unsorted, something that Ron had just shoved into a box and refused to label and decide whether to keep or throw away. “Ron… Why did you leave the army?”

It seemed like a heavy question in the way it pressed down Ron’s shoulders and made him huff under its burden. He threw an almost helpless glance to Carwood, but he couldn’t decide if he was begging him to press him more or to back off. He could only offer an open expression and invite Ron to decide for himself.

“Why do you ask that again?”

“Because that’s why you’re giving me this repenting cold shoulder. That was never you and I don’t know why you’re doing that now as if I wouldn’t understand whatever is bothering you. I was there too, you know. Not maybe for three wars, but for one very big one. I was there, right next to you, damn near holding your hand, so whatever it is that’s weighing you down so, you can tell me. Tell me, Ron.”

Ron chewed his lower lip so hard it bled. Carwood could see the pink skin splitting and the cherry-red blood bubble blooming before Ron sucked it into his mouth. 

“I did mention the prison, right?” Ron said.

“Yes, that you did,” Carwood replied. 

“Well…” Ron started and started raking again. Carwood watched him work for a moment and concluded that he wanted something to distract himself while he spoke, and so he joined him at it, deciding to wait for him to speak. 

“I wasn’t an actual guard but the American liaison there, but still I got to meet some of the prisoners. You remember how supposedly hard it was even in Germany to meet actual Nazis? It isn’t in that prison, and they are all so casual about it. They know everything they did and they don’t care,” Ron explained with a puzzled frown, like he was staring at something very simple that he still wasn’t able to grasp. “That’s the part that I couldn’t deal with. They are the evilest things that came out of the war, mass-murderers every single one of them, but they are also very normal. There wasn’t anything special about them, nothing exceptional.”

Carwood waited. The pile of leaves grew, resembling a bonfire surrounded by dead grass. The yard looked dead but neat, the grass like hair combed flat by the rakes and the leaves in one big pile about to be dumped somewhere unseen to rot. 

“You never asked me about the rumours about me,” Ron noted when they met in the middle and finally had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do. “I was sure you wanted to ask me, the first time when we got talking.”

Carwood remembered well. He had just been taking a roster of the men and concluded that the company had gained a good officer and finally shaken a lousy one, and Ron had taken his staring the wrong way. 

“I never cared,” Carwood said with a shrug. At first it had been irrelevant and then he had got to know Ron himself and didn’t need anyone else’s input about him. 

That didn’t seem to be what Ron wanted to hear though. He made a dry noise of acknowledgement and finally stopped tearing into the grass. He wouldn’t meet Carwood’s eyes. 

“Winters wrote me a year or so ago and asked about the stories,” he said. “I replied with the truth.” 

“Right,” Carwood said, trying to sound encouraging.

Ron looked straight at him. “I killed those prisoners back then. There were eight of them and they were all unarmed, digging a ditch under guard. I had been fighting with a handful of my men from Dog all night, and there wasn’t any other officer but me. We had spent the whole night tearing through the enemy and wandering around lost before finding the DZ, and then I got the word that there were prisoners. We weren’t supposed to take prisoners. We had no way to watch them, nowhere to put them, and in my opinion supporting the invasion was more important than sacrificing men to babysit the unarmed enemy that hadn’t had the good sense to fall in battle. No one was willing to deal with it, so I decided it might as well be me. I decided to be kind about it though. I let them have their last smoke in this world and didn’t make a big, miserable deal about it. I just let them be, and then I killed them.”

It was a considerably tamer story that the one about thirty POWs Ron had killed in cold blood just for fun that Carwood had heard. He hadn’t believed it of course, and not only because thirty cigarettes was too many to waste on the enemy and thirty prisoners was a suspiciously round number anyway. 

He didn’t say anything, and perhaps expecting some sort of a reaction Ron seemed to feel the need to go on. “I think I was a little glad about it too. It was my first taste of combat, and I took to it well. Those few days, I was so riled up you wouldn’t believe it. I was furious and merciless, and I think I was thirsty for more blood too. It wasn’t just a personal sacrifice for the sake of tactical advantage. My men had fallen, and I wanted blood. Frankly, I’m glad you didn’t know me yet because you wouldn’t have liked what you saw at all.” He paused for a moment and licked his split lip with a frown on his face. He looked like he didn’t quit believe he had just said all that and didn’t even seem to notice the gust of cold wind that rose suddenly. Then he shrugged with one shoulder like there was no helping it but he tried to shake the weight pressing him down anyway. “And last year in Germany I thought that if the evilest people in the world are so normal, then how can I know I’m not a bad person who just isn’t able to care – “

Carwood had heard enough and he didn’t need more. He let go of the rake and let it drop on the ground and strode towards Ron, who startled at his sudden approach, but before he had the chance to question him about it he had reached him and put his arms around him. Pulling Ron into his arms was easy, and squeezing him tight against his chest with his cheek pressed against his, Carwood held him.

“Don’t you run away from me, Ron Speirs,” he told him firmly. “We lived through evil times but we’re not evil people. We’re all killers, because it had to be like that and we lived. You were angry that day. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”

Ron let himself be held. “I doubt everyone would write that off just for being angry.”

Carwood huffed. “I’m not everyone and I’m not just anyone either. You’re not on trial, but if you can worry about if you’re a bad person so much that you drop everything, I think you’re on the winning side.”

Ron sighed and his hands came to rest on Carwood’s waist lightly, just holding him there. “So do you think it was a mistake?”

“What was?” 

“Retiring this suddenly and just… Coming home without having anything planned or prepared?”

Carwood pushed Ron back enough so that he could look at him. He did look older than in his memories and there was this new restlessness to him as well, something that the furious and steadfast young man had been a complete stranger to. At twenty-five Ron hadn’t questioned himself or his actions but simply steamrolled forward with the rage of a storm, but this forty-year-old version seemed to have come to a pause at some point and reconsidered the world and himself. Carwood did see that there was a more realized confidence to Ron’s being now, but it had clearly come from the same source of consideration and maturity as that restlessness and guilt that had driven him back home.

Carwood smiled and couldn’t see anything to hate. “I’m really happy to see you again,” he considered aloud, as much to himself as to Ron. “Whatever brought you back to me, I’m not going to feel too bad about it.” 

Ron’s tired frown dissolved into a faint smile and he averted his gaze. Carwood was reminded of a choir and candlelight watching that, a beautiful stranger in front of him and looking at him like he was as much hope to him as he was to Carwood. 

“”These men don’t care about the stories’…” Ron muttered as if to himself, that smile still playing on his lips. 

Something warm grew inside Carwood’s chest, something that swell and pressed against his lungs and couldn’t be touched by the miserable wet chill of the weather. “Fine, _I_ don’t care about them,” he admitted with a huff of a laugh, caught fifteen years later after the comment. “I’m just glad that you’re here.”

The wind was picking up again, and it was starting to drizzle. Small drops fell here and there, but their drumming as faint as it was yet was insistent. The mass of clouds swirled above, low and heavy. It was a poor flying weather. 

A raindrop rapped on Ron’s face and made his eye twitch briefly. The droplet rolled like a tear down his cheek, and another soon followed. The starting rain didn’t seem to be bothering him as he was concentrating on Carwood with a strange look in his eyes, the same one he had seen back at the reunion and through the week on moments that seemed to be significant to Ron. 

Carwood still didn’t know what all those looks were about and he doubted he ever would. There were sides of Ron he would never know and could never touch, fifteen years he had already lost forever, and he doubted that would ever stop hurting completely. Carwood knew a thing or two about wounds that never healed and never stopped hurting, but through that he was also happy about the man who stood in the middle of a yard next to the pile of soon to be rotting leaves with him.

Rain started more than drizzling and Carwood could feel it wetting his hair and running down his scalp. He reached out and took Ron’s hand. 

Ron looked down at their linked hands, then back up to Carwood with his brows raised and head tilted.

“Come inside, I’m feeling cold,” Carwood said and started pulling Ron after him.

He followed without a word or trying to get his hand free. Briefly Carwood let go in the entrance hall to shed his coat and toe off his shoes, and Ron followed his example, and once done Carwood took his hand again and led him up the stairs.

Ron didn’t say a word the entire time Carwood pulled him along, all the way to the master bedroom, where he closed the door behind them and turned to face Ron.

“What are we doing here?” Ron asked, eyeing him carefully and his voice low, hopeful but reserved. His cheeks and the tip of his nose were red from the cold and his hair messed by the wind. 

“We’re dancing,” Carwood replied, reaching over to brush a wet strand of hair from Ron’s forehead. 

For a moment they just stood there by the door and at the foot of the bed, close but not quite touching like they didn’t know how to. Carwood wanted to laugh. They were entirely too old to be coy like that, and perhaps there was more than that to push through, a thick veil of memories and expectations keeping them apart more than their clothes or any lingering consideration for decency could. 

Carwood knotted his hands into the hem of Ron’s shirt, the polyester-blend of the sweater as well as the cotton of the shirt underneath feeling like some sort of a border to cross. He used the fabric to pull Ron closer, and he came easily, almost pressing against him but not daring to touch, just his eyes peering at Carwood with a desire that extended to his parted lips that bared teeth as if he was hungry. 

Carwood weaved the thick fabric in his hands, baring skin underneath and lightly brushing his knuckles against it. He bowed his head and chuckled. “I don’t think I’ve ever touched you here,” he mumbled and brushed against Ron’s side and the slight curve of his now bare waist again.

Ron breathed deeply, and Carwood could feel the warm puff of his exhale against his cheek. Ron had his hands raised on the level of his waist too, but unlike Carwood he didn’t dare to touch yet, almost as if he was afraid of breaking something. “You have touched very little of me, actually,” he said.

Something about that bothered Carwood, and that bothersome feeling encouraged him to let go of Ron’s shirt and turn his palms against his skin, and the fabric of his shirts fell over his hands, leaving them to feel Ron up. He bit his lip and smoothed his hands up, coming to touch the lowest of Ron’s ribs. He pressed closer still and leaned his cheek towards the warmth of Ron’s breath, feeling it stuttering. “I’ve had you inside me,” he noted in a murmur, “I wouldn’t call that ‘little’.” 

Ron’s hand was at the back of his neck then like appearing out of nowhere, his fingers sinking into his damp hair. Carwood shivered at the contact, his eyes fell closed and he turned to seek out Ron just as he did the same, and they found their way into a kiss. It was similar to the kiss from last night only for a short moment that they hovered near each other, and then the contact broke. Carwood opened his mouth to sigh, and Ron dived back in at the same time with his fingers tightening their hold in his hair, and what fell on him was a deep, open-mouthed kiss that tasted distantly of morning coffee and pulled him under. 

Carwood couldn’t help but to moan into the kiss when Ron took a hold of him and with a thrill let himself be tasted. He gasped into Ron’s mouth and gave a shocked little whine when he has suddenly taken into his lover’s arms. 

There was the possessiveness and the strength Carwood remembered and he gasped in delight when he was grasped, greedy hands pressing into the soft flesh of his side and shamelessly groping his ass. 

When the heat got too strong and he felt like he was either going to melt or that his legs would give out, Carwood pulled back from the kiss and gasped for breath. “I want to look at you. I want to talk to you. Please, I want… I’ve always wanted…” he rambled on, his lips sore and his hands palming the beautiful slope of Ron’s back and his strong chest.

Ron kneaded his flesh almost painfully even through two shirts and denim, and with Carwood’s head tilted back he settled to feed his hunger from his neck, licking a trail up to the soft place under his chin. “Yes. Yes, I’ll give you anything you want, anything,” he swore against his skin, his voice rough in a way Carwood had never heard before, only dreamed of.

They undressed each other, shirts coming over heads and tossed onto the floor, and before either could get much more than the buttons of their jeans open they were already on the bed. It was challenge to undress like that, the covers and sheets kicked around with the clothes, but it was a good fight. Baring everything for a lover when the rain drummed harder behind the windows was like something out of a dream, and whenever Carwood shed a layer of clothes Ron was there to kiss him there.

Being completely naked in the middle of the bed and slowly laid down by him made Carwood want to touch him all over to make sure he was really there. He was, his skin flushed warm, his scars where he remembered them, and a few cold droplets of rain running down his nape. Carwood indulged an urge from one of the past evenings and pressed his face against Ron’s chest, inhaling his scent. He kissed him there, and Ron’s fingers in his hair tightened as if to keep him there. 

“Hang on a moment,” Ron said and then was off the bed. 

Carwood sat up, suddenly cold and alone, but watching Ron’s naked behind when he went to the bathroom was worth it. Ron didn’t take long and soon came back with a small tin he had apparently taken from his toiletries bag, then climbed back to bed and with a firm hand to his chest pressed Carwood back down.

“So, you came prepared,” Carwood couldn’t help but note when Ron unscrewed the lid and scooped Vaseline onto his fingers.

Ron had the nerve to look sheepish. “I didn’t really. It’s just… More like a habit at this point,” he explained.

“Whatever,” Carwood said, pushing his hands into Ron’s hair and the thoughts of his other lovers out of his mind, “let’s call it lucky.”

If he was going to explain more, Ron forgot it the moment Carwood spread his legs, his keen eyes darting down and staying there. Carwood couldn’t say he thought of himself as particularly attractive, but Ron had a way to make him feel like he was. He had felt that way half deliriously back then with his trousers around his thighs and his jacket and shirt pushed up when Ron had ran his fingers along his spine, and just his heated gaze had the same effect now.

“Wait a moment,” Ron said, and before Carwood could ask he reached for one of the pillows on the bed and pushed it under Carwood’s hips. “There. That’ll keep you more comfortable.”

Something about that was so heartachingly tender that Carwood had to reach for Ron, who was too far away with three inches of mattress between them. “Come here,” he called, and obediently Ron scooped closer, pressing against his side, skin against skin. 

It thrilled him to feel his hard-on against the side of his hip, and Carwood gave a delighted little sigh at the feeling, then another when Ron’s slick hand slipped between his legs. He trembled, closed his eyes and leaned his head on Ron’s arm when he felt the thick clod of soft cream pressed against him, then gentle fingers firmly rubbing it in. Fingertips pressed very lightly at first, gently coaxing and rubbing, but then pressing harder, first asking and then insisting, before finally sinking in.

Carwood took in a deep breath and then let it out in a deep whine, his belly growing warm.

“You always liked this part,” Ron breathed into his ear, his fingers pumping slowly and deliberately, caressing and coaxing. 

“Yeah, yeah I like it,” Carwood answered, nudging blindly towards Ron and running his hands up and down his back in a feverish need to feel as much of him as he could. “Oh, I love it when you do that. Slowly… Slowly…”

“We have all the time now,” Ron said and kissed his cheek, his ear, his hair, so gentle even when his hand moved so decisively. Never roughly, but the waves of his movements were strong and deep, all of his previous shyness gone. “Did you ever do this after?” 

“Sometimes…” Carwood started to answer, but then Ron found just the right spot and he bowed off the bed and his words died in this throat as he moaned. A spark of pulsing pleasure that curled deep inside his belly and trickled all over his pelvis and down his thighs kept him suspended in the arc until Ron’s caress relented, but only for a moment. Ron growled with desire and his teeth happened on the side of his neck. 

“Sometimes, when I missed this… I tried it alone,” Carwood started to talk again, and when Ron pulled his fingers out again he relaxed, but only to buck up again when he pushed inside, “I’d use my fingers but it’s not that good by yourself, always liked you better, so much better…” 

“I could do this forever. I can’t believe I never took the time to watch you like this, you look so needy, you know?” Ron mused in an entranced breath, then stopped for a moment to scoop up more Vaseline from the tin and drew out a breathless moan out of Carwood by pushing in a third finger. 

Carwood opened his eyes and watched Ron leaning on his elbow, his darkened eyes nailed on him and drinking in the sight of him. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what he must have looked like, flushed and sweaty with his jaw slack, hands reaching for his lover and his legs spread. It must have been an obscene, even wanton display, but if it made Ron stare at him like that, in awe and so hungry that Carwood shivered to think what he’d do to him, then so be it. 

“I want you,” he said in a hoarse voice, thick with desire and desperate. He was holding Ron already, both hands on his skin and arms around him, but he wanted closer, and could see in Ron’s eyes that he wanted too. “I want you now.” 

Nimble as ever, Ron was on him in a flash. It startled a laugh out of Carwood, and Ron answered it with a grin like he knew exactly how it impressed Carwood, but then leaned down to kiss him again. Carwood forgot his hurry, even the throbbing need burning in his gut like something molten, and just kissed Ron. He inhaled deep and smelled the dark scent of his soap mixed in with autumn air lingering in his hair and perspiration that was getting stronger, and it was all so desirable he wanted to press closer and lather his every sense with Ron’s presence.

As they kissed, Carwood reached for him and slowly pet his hands over everything, drawing circles and tracing wide paths on Ron’s body. How handsome he was, and how strong, Carwood adored the curves of his muscles, his taut chest and middle, and ran his hands down Ron’s arms, fingers spread over the round biceps. Such a beautiful man, so desirable in his form that was like straight out of his daydream, and better yet for being here, warm and real and thrumming with desire for him.

Ron hummed into the kiss as he was caressed and stayed like he was, between Carwood’s legs stretched over him, his hands planted on both sides of his head like in a static push-up. He was moving too, flexing and swaying like a big cat about to bounce, but he allowed Carwood to have his moment, all tame and close to purring. 

Carwood ran his hand down Ron’s chest, down his belly and reached lower. Ron shivered and made a choking noise in the back of his throat. He wanted to touch all of him, and tracing his fingers down the hot shaft of his cock before wrapping them around it was a thrill. Like kissing, it felt like something that should have happened ages ago. He couldn’t believe it was the first time. 

“You feel so good,” he murmured against Ron’s lips, slowly pumping his fist.

Ron opened his mouth to gasp against Carwood lips, gently rocking into his hold. He groaned, shook, squirmed. “Oh God…”

Something about his deeply pleasured voice that came from somewhere deep made a new wave of heat flare up in Carwood’s gut. He raised his leg and ran his foot up Ron’s calf and thigh. “Are you going to take me or not?” he teased even with his voice so full of impatient want that it would have made him blush had he any shame left. He caressed Ron so slowly he knew it was nothing but agony. “Come on, I’ve missed you, I’ve missed you for so long, Ron.” 

Ron gave a huff, almost a growl and suddenly jerked forward. He slapped Carwood’s hand away and hunched his hips forward, pushing his own hand there to guide himself. Carwood grabbed a hold of his shoulders waiting for a sudden burst of pressure, but what he got was a slow, teasing press of the tip and a predatory grin from his lover.

“Say please,” Ron cooed and lay a soft, innocent kiss on his cheek that was the complete opposite of the way he was pressing the tip of his cock against the opening. 

Carwood took in a shivering breath, the heat inside him swirling, hungry and wanting. Every second he had to wait was too much, he felt empty and teased and impatient, and somehow the coo and the kiss made him feel even more so. He squirmed. “Please?” he begged softly only to satisfy Ron, whose grin tempered into a pleased smile. 

“Of course, darling,” he sighed, and then gave one slow, strong push of his hips and thrust inside.

Carwood had forgotten the feeling of being filled and moaned at the suddenness of it. He had to close his eyes and just let himself shake with how taken he felt, how held when his body opened up like that, and how the feeling shimmered through him, making his toes curl and his scalp tingle. 

“I love the way you sound,” Ron groaned and stroked a hand down Carwood’s cheek. He was already pulling out and just as firmly he thrust back inside, steady like a wave and Carwood had to gasp and moan again, and Ron sighed at it. “I wondered about that… I want you so much, even when I have you…”

It sounded like it was just as much about the past as it was about the present, and Carwood recognized that need, that unfulfilled desperate scrabbling for something more. He squeezed down with his muscles and rocked back against Ron in a desperate attempt to have more of him, to take him deeper, and even when he was shivering with pulse after pulse of building pleasure, he was flooded with the need for more.

He wrapped his arms around Ron’s neck and pulled him down and silenced that stream of confession with a kiss. It was barely a kiss, but just caressing his lips with his own, even when wet and sore, seemed to settle that wounded feeling still lingering in his heart. 

Ron pulled back again. “Do you like this?” 

Carwood didn’t open his eyes, just nodded. “Yeah, I like this, feels good.” 

Ron’s hips gave a strong thrust that made Carwood choke on his moan. “Like that? How do you want it? Harder? Deeper?” 

“Slowly,” Carwood panted, his hands running down Ron’s arms again and took a hold of him to steady himself, “and deep, I want… I want you to –”

“Yes,” Ron groaned, “Anything you want, anything.” 

He was gentle, so gentle it made Carwood want to cry, but he felt too good to do anything except pant, moan and praise his lover with his hands on his shoulders, his face or his chest. Ron was holding onto the headboard with one hand and moving with the same pace, only gradually increasing the strength of his thrusts when his own breath was starting to come in shorter puffs and he was letting out long, deep groans in the back of his throat that Carwood hadn’t heard before and couldn’t get enough of.

Ron cradled Carwood’s face with his hand, his thumb catching on the edge of his panting mouth, and blindly Carwood turned towards it, sucking the finger in his mouth briefly before kissing his palm. 

Ron let out a hoarse moan. “Why are you so… So…” he started but missed his train of thought. He hummed with deep pleasure and thrust his hips just right, pushing as deep as he could go.

Carwood held onto Ron’s shoulders and let his head loll back on the mattress, only caring about keeping his hips meeting Ron’s thrusts. Ron sighed, and his warm palm smoothed its way from Carwood’s hip down his thigh to the back of his knee, where he took a hold and pushed it up towards his chest. 

It shifted Carwood's position very slightly but enough, he cried out in sudden shock of pleasure and must have squeezed down because Ron growled, and then his thrusts became faster. It was a wild race towards the peak, quick and powerful and just right to keep those hot shocks coming, and Carwood sank his nails into Ron’s back in an attempt to keep himself grounded on something, and then Ron’s hand, deliciously soft and slippery with Vaseline, grasped his cock and brought him to the edge with confident strokes of a fist that squeezed him just right.

When Carwood came and sank into the buzz of ecstasy, Ron was still on his way, and he used his last coherent brain activity to keep him going. He couldn’t explain it to himself, but it was somehow important to him to keep Ron there, in the tangle of limbs, trapped inside his body and have him come like that, to take him and satisfy him as much as he had just done. 

Ron shuddered when he came and let out a deeply relieved moan that turned into a hum. Carwood watched him through half-lidded eyes, how his frown dissolved into bliss, how he panted through his red lips and how a droplet of sweat ran down his cheek. He watched his bicep flex before he let go of the headboard and slumped down, where Carwood received him into his arms and pressed his face into his damp hair.

They rolled onto their sides without letting each other go and let out a shared sigh. Carwood wanted to keep holding onto Ron and stay basking in their shared heat, to keep breathing in his scent and taste his sweat, and it seemed that Ron was entirely willing to let him. He was satisfied and claimed, lured into his arms and soothed there, and Carwood wanted to keep him. 

He must have fallen asleep for a moment, because when he opened his eyes again, he was under the covers and Ron was lying next to him with his head resting on the palm of his propped up arm and watching him.

Carwood smiled. “For once you’re there when I wake up and not the other way around,” he said. 

Ron smiled back. “Aren’t you sweet,” he said and reached over to brush off a strand of hair from Carwood’s forehead, then continued that caress down his cheek and let his fingers linger on his chin. 

Carwood was content to lie there and listen to the rain. He heard it falling on the tiles of the roof and imagined the street outside becoming flooded with the downpour. October had become suddenly furious with the slow march towards the end of the year and the cold slumber of winter, but in that moment he was warm and content in the bed that fit him and his lover. The house didn’t feel so empty as much as it felt clean and filled with only important things.

“I wish I had written to you,” Ron said, his hand still lingering on Carwood’s face. He didn’t look too regretful about it, but perhaps that was due to his age. He had come to accept the lingering doubts about missed opportunities, and now they were but a shimmer of melancholy in the bottom of his eyes. 

“Why didn’t you?” Carwood asked while offering the line of his jaw to be petted. 

“I don’t know,” Ron sighed as he followed the smooth angle from the tip of his lover’s chin to the temple, where his finger stroked the short hair neatly cut above the ear. “Perhaps… Perhaps I didn’t want to disturb what you had.”

Carwood frowned, not unkindly. “How did you know what I had if you didn’t write me and ask?” 

Ron actually smiled at that, but that melancholy shining in the bottom of his eyes like a coin down a well kept the joy out of it. “Winters wrote about you from time to time, mentioning your degree, your job, your wife, then your children. He must have figured out that I wasn’t writing to you, but still guessed that I wanted to know something, especially when you didn’t come to the reunions. I often wonder how much he knows about you and me, but of course I didn’t ask that either. I just knew you were doing well for yourself, that was enough. I didn’t want to impose.” 

Carwood’s heart beat painfully. It wasn’t much, but enough to be felt and recognized as pain, and he didn’t feel the need to pretend otherwise now. “You were my best friend. You wouldn’t have imposed.”

Ron gave him an endeared smile. His palm cradled Carwood’s face for no other reason than that he wanted to. “You are the love of my life. Knowing you were out there living a good life was enough for me, and all I could bear to hear.”

Carwood rested his face on Ron’s palm and let him pet his cheek. “Our timing was off,” he said. That was what he had concluded over the years, among other things of course such as legality and distance, but above all of those was the timing. They were too young, born too early, stuff like that. It was nobody’s fault, and with that Carwood had been able to think of Ron fondly and almost painlessly. 

Ron shrugged like it wasn’t that big of a deal. “At least I got to meet you.”

Carwood wasn’t sure if he meant back then or now. 

The storm and the rain took care of the rest that there was to be done. The garden had to be tidied but raking the rest of the leaves was a job for one short afternoon. After that there were only boxes to either put to garbage or donated to Goodwill, and the ones with things Carwood wanted to keep fit very well in the trunk and on the backseat of his car. 

The only thing really worth moving all the way to another state was the double bed from the master bedroom and some carpets, all the rest Carwood decided to either donate or sell, and on the last day at the house there was nothing in any room, only a small stack of boxes ready to be loaded into the car, cleaning supplies, a trash bag, and two packed bags on the porch. 

Carwood took one last look through the house to make certain it was really empty and in prime condition, but really to say goodbye. It was strange to be so attached to a place he hadn’t lived in for years, but he supposed a childhood home was a childhood home and there was no arguing with that. He allowed himself to take a last look at the attic chamber, at his old room and even at that black spot on the porch. 

Finally, he closed all the doors, gathered up the keys, made certain the windows were closed and locked, and then he and Ron carried the boxes to his car, disposed of the trash and locked the front door.

It was a clear but cold day, and Carwood turned his collar up against the wind. Everything that he wanted to keep had been packed. Almost. 

“Do you want a ride somewhere?” he asked Ron. 

Ron was acting distant again, somehow just as wistful about the house as Carwood was. “The bus station, please.”

Carwood slammed the trunk of his car shut and nodded even though he wasn’t comfortable with that. Ron lingered on the driveway with his hands in the pockets of his bomber jacket and his small bag over his shoulder just like the day he had arrived, glancing back at the house, the sky and the street, anywhere but Carwood.

Carwood got into his car and started the engine to warm it up. “You know, I could drive you all the way to wherever you want to go,” he said. “I’d be more than happy to. I’d really enjoy your company on the road.” 

Ron indulged him with a smile. “It’s really been a wonderful week, and I am thankful. But I should just leave.”

Carwood didn’t like that at all. He had liked going to bed with Ron and then sleeping with him, maybe even more sleeping next to him and waking up there in the morning, but what he didn’t like was this once again shut-off Ron that feigned him off like a dream that tried to follow him too far into the day. 

“Or,” he started, “you could come with me. All the way.” He let every implication weigh on the words and gave Ron a steady look.

Ron returned it but gave him one of those muted smiles of his, digging his hands deeper into his pockets. “What, all the way back to your mother’s?” he said. “What then? You’re going to introduce me to your family and then we’ll go see houses arm in arm?”

It had the bitter bite of someone who had lived a very different life than Carwood had and there was no undoing that. He wasn’t naïve, but he wasn’t about to be too easily spooked either. He tapped the steering wheel with his fingers and thought about it.

“Yeah, actually,” he said. “Come back to my mother’s for dinner, I’ll introduce you. Then we’ll figure out things from there.”

Ron huffed a laugh, but his brows stayed knitted together. “I don’t even have a job, I live at my sister’s…”

“Ron, do you think I’ve been thinking about your salary and properties much during these past years?” Carwood interrupted with a disbelieving shake of his head. It was starting to be sufficiently warm in the car, and the gas tank seemed to be full enough to take them almost to the state line. Carwood turned his eyes back to Ron, who looked at him like a dream someone else had told him to wake up from.

“You know that I love you, right?” Carwood asked.

There was a flame in Ron’s eyes, but instead of burning it was just bright and warm. He looked back at Carwood softly and eyes wide like he hadn’t dared to be sure. It wasn’t the strongest moment for Ron’s gift of perception. 

Carwood sighed once again and wondered what he was getting himself into, but reached over the gearbox to push open the passenger side door all the same. Ron seemed to stand still for a moment longer only out of stubbornness, but as Carwood waited, he eventually climbed in on his place next to him.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Not so desolate anymore](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27262162) by [Lysel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lysel/pseuds/Lysel)




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